How I got a Nintendo Switch Lite

 Annual post time!!

Now that there isn't much left of 2020, looking back at this year, one of the best/funniest things that happened to me this year was when I was like "if I earn enough with commissions/donations, I shall buy a Nintendo Switch Lite so I can play this darn Fire Emblem game I'm so crazy about

- ahaha just kidding... UNLESS..."

And that's the story of how I got my Switch.

A few days after I made this announcement, the Claude drawing I posted on the same day suddenly blew up on Twitter. Nothing I posted on Twitter for 5 years received any particularly remarkable attention before that one drawing. And all of a sudden, there was no end to notifications and even famous artists started following me. It was like everything in the universe was conspiring together to get me that Switch.

I think my Ko-fi goal was maybe $230, but I'd already had 43% of the money from earlier commissions. That was enough to buy a Switch Lite at that time. A lot of people donated (most of them came from Twitter), so I managed to collect the money and have the Switch in my hands in less than a month.

Little did I know in the summer of 2018 when I went "oh my gosh, the yellow archer kid has such a fun design, too bad I don't play Fire Emblem" that it would eventually escalate into this. XD

My FE3H fanart will meet an inevitable decline in popularity in 2021 as the game was released in July 2019 and FE3H fans are already moving on to new hyperfixations, but I'm still having a blast playing the game and drawing fanart. <3

Thank you!

Annual post

So I guess I've officially migrated my sketches to Twitter. I originally made an account there in 2015 to stalk the cool Japanese/Chinese artists and participate in the PH69min challenge, but now I post there sketches and shit I'm too shy to post elsewhere. I log in and retweet a lot because I have the app on my phone, so it's easy to access all the time.
I still think I could use this blog for something but I just don't have the time/energy for it, I guess.
And nobody is looking at it anyway.
Bye~

First and last post of 2018

Where the heck did 2018 go?

Hmm, so last few hours of the year, you say?

Actually, not much happened to me in 2018. Still, it was a pretty great year for me. I feel like I achieved somewhat of a financial stability and I got more confident and stronger thanks to my job. I did have some depressive episodes, there were times when I was feeling down and I still have no social life, but 2018 was a good year in overall.

As for drawing, I really don't know. I am now certain that commissions were the only things that kept me going, as soon as I saw no interest and closed them, I completely stopped drawing. As I grow older, it just makes me feel ashamed. I still draw like a teenager and I'm over 30 already. I don't think I should keep forcing it since I'll never be half as good as I'd wanted to be. I've been on deviantART practicing and doing art as a hobby since freaking 2006. I saw improvement memes and they make me cry. :I

I'm not saying I shall never draw again because I'm a fickle person and will do it anyway if I feel like drawing again. In fact, I may start posting some older art on this blog or DA that fell victim to tumblr's "NO NSFW" rule.

Idk what to do with this blog. I may start using it again in 2019. Let's see.

Anyway, since my last post was a sims post in 2017, I'll post some sims again on the last day of this year. :B

One of my fav sims in The Sims 2 recently died so
RIP Claudia 01.11.2015-12.29.2018
(She lived for 77 sim days but almost 4 years in real time because I've been playing the game on and off with long breaks and I have shitloads of sims/families. Haha.)

~~HAPPY NEW YEAR~~

Saying goodbye to The Sims 3

To save up some space on my HDD, I decided to get rid of The Sims 3. I haven't really played it in over 3 years after all...

I'd like to say a few words about the game before I delete it, though.

The open neighbourhood was a great new feature compared to the older games, but I think it had its drawbacks too. My game was only a "beta" game with only 1 neighbourhood (Sunset Valley) and no expansion packs, so this might have been the cause but if I played the same game for too long, all the cool premade families died out (often without a "heir") and got replaced by dumb computer-generated randomized sims who always had "male voice 1" and "female voice 1". Literally everybody sounded the same after playing for a while plus they were super random sims. They often seemed to reproduce by mitosis since single sims had babies more often than couples left alone. I once moved in a single woman for my male sim to meet with and possibly marry and then she had a baby within 24 sim hours after I moved her in the neighbourhood. :| Tbh I didn't really wanna start my sim's married life by having to raise a goddamn clone baby... Also, I once played with a family for quite a long time. When the 4th generation grew up, I continued the game with the younger girl (out of 3 siblings). The rest of the family ended up quitting their jobs, breaking up with their spouses, etc. The kids they had all had the same hairstyles and voices.
In the end I was like "NAH, GIMME BACK THE SIMS 2 where I can control the entire neighbourhood!"

These were the drawbacks. I liked the new personality trait selection thingy where you could pick from a much wider variety of traits than before for your sims. Though some of them really don't do much. The moodlets were fun too. The texture selection was an amazing thing too. You could buy anything in any colour and/or texture, it certainly gave a unique feel to the outfits and household objects. Certain challenges like making Ambrosia were really fun for avid players like me. The toddler life stage was too long in The Sims 3, though. Raising toddlers and having to tend to their needs is a time-consuming task for your sims, 4 days were enough for that in The Sims 2.

The graphics are definitely a lot nicer than in The Sims 2, but you don't get to appreciate your sims' beauty or their unique accessories because you play zoomed out most of the time (at least I did) because of the open neighbourhood.

So yeah, maybe I'm just getting old, but I didn't like this game as much as its predecessors.
Anyway, let me post a few screenshots here of my favourite families:

His first child and it's a girl! It's really hard getting a girl as your first child in The Sims 3 for some reason.

Same family. Daddy playing videogames with daughter and her friend watching.

The siblings I mentioned. I really liked this family while I was controlling them all. Then I chose the younger girl (in red) when she got married.

She was a scientist and knowledge-loving sim. I had her master gardening and fishing and had her make Ambrosia. She also had several children with her family-loving husband. I'd wanted to continue the game by keeping her young, breaking up with her old husband, moving her out and starting her life anew, but I kinda liked her only daughter as well, so I never did it in the end. I started new games instead.

So these were my adventures with The Sims 3. I shall continue Dragon Age once I get a new computer or new graphics card. I may try The Sims 4 as well, but I'm afraid I'm not all that interested in Sims games anymore.

Animu list

Okay so my graphics card died and I'm using this opportunity to do a big PC cleaning and reorganize/delete all the shit I saved and downloaded in the past 9+ years. I'm writing a list here of the anime I currently have on my external HDD. The ones I definitely want to keep are bolded, undecided ones are italic and the ones that must go are in strikethrough.

1. 07-Ghost
2. Ao no Exorcist
3. Bakuman
4. Claymore
5. Code Geass
6. Code Geass R2
7. Dantalian no Shoka
8. Deadman Wonderland
9. Dogs OVA
10. Durarara
11. Eden of the East (series + movie sequels)
12. FMA Brotherhood
13. Gosick
14. Hakuouki (trash but looks good and maybe I can use it for art reference)
15. Kuragehime
16. Kuroshitsuji (trash but looks good and maybe I can use it for art reference)
17. Kuroshitsuji 2 (trash but looks good and maybe I can use it for art reference)
18. Magi
19. Magi season 2
20. No.6
21. Otome Yokai Zakuro
22. Pandora Hearts
23. Puella Magi Madoka Magica
24. Rainbow
25. School Days
26. Seikimatsu Occult Gakuin (trash that I still liked for some odd reason)
27. Shiki
28. Supernatural
29. Tales of the Abyss
30. Tiger and Bunny
31. Togainu no Chi
32. Toradora
33. Umineko no Naku Koro Ni
34. Usagi Drop

Others:

• Gintama Benizakura movie
• Black Rock Shooter OVA
• Spice and Wolf II OVA that I downloaded but couldn't make the file work 

 Oh well, there's actually a lot that I'd like to keep. I guess I'll have to delete the undecided ones then... Some of the bolded ones are bound to change too. All this anime is about 200 GB of disk space, so I could free up a lot of space if I deleted just half of these.

Sometimes I just want to lie down and die

Writing this very personal post here because nobody reads this blog but I need to vent somewhere.

Last post of 2014: VinceAda Hell

Long time no post again. To be honest, I haven't been drawing much. I'd thought I'd be able to draw so much in December, but I failed. orz I'm trying to draw for at least 1 hour every day, though. But it seems I'm only getting worse and worse... ;___;

This is a scribble I did for Halloween. It wasn't turning out well, so I never finished it.

Very quick draft for a big picture I'd like to draw one day. Knowing myself I'll never draw it in the end, but I'm posting this here as a reminder because I may end up commissioning someone to draw it for me.

I was tagged with a kiss meme on deviantART a long time ago and this sketch was done for that meme. It's "kiss on the shoulder" VinceAda style.

More VinceAda. This is almost finished, though still needs a lot of tweaking and amending. Whyisitsobrightasdds... I originally did the base scribble of this in October and it wasn't refined or anything, just two stick figures facing each other, but I saved it for some reason. So I opened the file a few days ago and turned them into Vincent and Ada. I hope I can post this somewhere today.

That's all I have to post for now. I don't even know what I'm doing but I somehow manage to waste my time pretty effectively... I guess I spent a lot of time on tumblr this year. I also keep watching anime and reading manga and talking to people on deviantART. I also started playing some computer games again. For example, I downloaded The Sims 2 Ultimate Collection when it was available to download for free during summer. I only started playing it in October, but Sims games were always somewhat addictive for me.

I love the evil snowmen grouchy sims build, lol. I think I've tried out all the expansion packs I never had (I only had the base game). The Pets expansion is probably the least fun for me even though I'd expected to like that one. But I really enjoy the addition of changing seasons, the new romantic interactions and I like sending my teenagers to university. And I suck at managing stores with Open for Business, lol. Anyway, now I don't know how I was able to play The Sims 2 without any expansions. One thing I don't like is how the game handles the personality points of sims who are born ingame. I usually get hyperactive hyper grouchy sims.

Another issue is the first serious glitch I've experienced. My teenage boy got 7,000 Simoleons of scholarship (+500 when I moved him in), all of his skills were at least level 8. But for some reason, there was a "cap" placed on the class performance meter thingy below the line and it stayed in the red zone no matter how many homeworks or essays he did. This means he cannot complete even the first semester and he'll eventually be kicked out and sent back to the main neighbourhood. Apparently, this glitch occurs if you put several valuable objects in your teen's inventory before sending them to university. (Since you can't give them money from their home household, giving them objects is the only way to raise their scholarship and allow them to buy better household items.) But if you move them to a dorm instead of a house, the class performance cap thingy doesn't appear.

Anyway, it seems I'm cursed with Sims glitches, haha. Or it's just that the game doesn't like what I want to do with it.

I don't think anybody is reading this blog anymore, but Happy New Year to everyone! I'll definitely try to do unproductive things less and draw more in 2015.

I'm drawing I'm drawing

Working on a bunch of things at the same time. I'm planning on drawing all afternoon today because of reasons.

I drew this in a rush yesterday evening when I realized that Vincent's birthday is on the 23rd. I drew him with a random flower crown last year and I went with the flower crown idea again. I originally drew little Vincent with his arms down but it looked weird (especially cropped - it would have been just his head lol), so I tried to draw him arms and hands hoping it wouldn't turn out like crap...

Retrace 97 killed me because of various reasons, one of them was Noise. I'm posting this drawing here because I'm not sure I'll manage to finish it by tomorrow.

I posted a rougher version of this last time. I'm still struggling with the umbrella tbh. XD;;; Also, I forgot to mention last time that the inspiration for this was this freaky rainy weather we had last summer and in September too. I don't remember another humid and rainy summer like this. We were often woken up in the middle of the night to thunderstorms. It rained and rained sometimes for 24 hours or more without break.

We had really beautiful weather in the past few days, though. It was that pleasant late summer weather. Still warm enough yet not hot. And everything is still so green and beautiful because it rained all summer. There were only a few days of really hot dry weather during all summer. So instead of the usual yellow dried out grass strands, there's beautiful green grass and little flowers everywhere. It's amazing.

This is my Sinbad/Kougyoku kiss picture I drew back in May. I had this idea to take a screencap from the anime and try to paint it as background. Holy shit, it's so hard. I'm switching between Photoshop and Sai using the screencap as reference and it has already taken me hours to paint this much. As you can see I'm not even doing the parts that will be covered by the characters, but it's still really time-consuming.

Anyway, the finished version will probably look like the cheesiest romance novel cover ever. XD;;;

I've also been working on this waka!Sinbad sketch and I must say I'm pretty pleased with how it's turning out. I refined his right arm so it doesn't look so big anymore and added a lot of details on his outfit.

Speaking of Sinbad and Magi... there are two fanartists on pixiv who keep destroying me with their drawings. Every time they upload a new art log, I feel like a little child getting a box of candy. One of them is 何某 and the other is 襲釗. I'm completely in love with 何某's art style and I love most of 襲釗's ideas. *A*

Okay, I think that's all I wanted to ramble about for now. I'll try to finish that little Vince + Noise sketch today~ 2-3 hours after lunch should be enough if I can manage to not get distracted...

May = baby birds

EDIT:  Ok, I think there are SEVEN chickadees, lol. I counted 7 the next morning.

Oh my god. I've never seen so many little chickadees in my window at the same time. 8D

Me and my family have been feeding birds for years now. Last winter only a few sparrows came, so we almost stopped feeding them, but around the end of February, we occasionally started seeing chickadees, greenfinches and goldfinches as well. There was a pair of chickadees that started coming regularly. They came more and more and we figured it must have been because they started raising their little ones. We've been hearing the young chickadees chirping for a couple of weeks now, but they didn't invade our window until today. Today was raining all day and it was also "chickadee invasion day". It happened before that they brought their kids, but never so many at the same time. X'D Imagine 5-6 little fluff balls chirping in your window. IT'S THE CUTEST THING. I swear they have at least 5 or 6 chicks because we could count this many at once. Yesterday and the day before, we watched the little sparrows, but most of them disappeared today. Maybe they were afraid of the chickadee army, lol.

I managed to take a few photos with my phone:

There are 5 of them here. It was hard to take photos of so many without scaring them away.

Two of them. They can eat by themselves now, but they still start chirping and asking for food when the parent birds appear, lol.

And here's a random sunset photo I took a few years ago. I must say there's a wonderful view from my window. I love living here. I'm really going to miss this place when I have to move one day.

Alright, this has been yet another pointless post. I could post a few wips and sketches, but I won't do that now. Maybe when I have more.

Random Ramblings of Randomness

Warning: This post is not going to make much sense. Read at your own risk.

First of all, I have no new drawings to post. I'm writing this now because I'm on 'holiday'. I'm currently working at the local town hall and we had to take a day off after the elections. I wanted to go to the doctor, but the receptionist told me I should have called and asked for an appointment first. Well, fuck. I've been going there for years now and I could just go, give them my health card and wait till they called me. Apparently, you need to call them to get an appointment now. Just for a frickin' prescription. :| I don't even know when I'm going to call them because I'm at work at the time you can actually call them. Oh well.

In connection with the elections - We always have to go to my old elementary school to vote and the drawings I did while I was a student there are still on the walls of the corridors. Looking at them now makes me think I really sucked at art back then (I did those when I was in 5th or 6th grade), but at the same time it's nice that they still didn't throw them out and replaced them with works by new students.

Putting the rest under a "Read More" because I feel like it.

Salalala 131211

I should have made a sketch today. Simply because it would have been funny to have a file name with 131211 in it, haha. But I had a busy day today...

Here's what I've been up to:
- I've been working.
- I've been studying.
- I have little time to go online and when I do, it's usually while I'm eating lunch/supper at home or something.
- I've been browsing tumblr instead of drawing.
- I've been still doing a few sketches and working on things here and there, but nothing finished enough / worth to post.
- I still don't have a social life.
- I'm still into Magi, but I'm not caught up with the manga and I'm downloading the anime episodes, but haven't had time to watch them lately, so I'm about 3 episodes behind. However, I keep seeing all the gifs on tumblr and I read the spoilers all the time. (It's faster to read the quick translations and stuff, so yeah.) I'm aware of what's going on. 8D

Pandora Hearts is on hiatus this month. TT___TT
Magi is also on hiatus this week (I think?).
*cold unpleasant wind of despair and solitude blowing*

Anyhow, I haven't done much in December regarding drawing yet.

I started colouring this one I drew back in July, but his face is freaking ugly. Damn you, Oz, why are you so bloody difficult to draw? DX I wanted this to be good, but it's not turning out the way I wanted and I'm not sure if I should waste more time and energy on it...

I started drawing this in November as a random headshot doodle. Then I got carried away.
I actually like this BaalSin more than my first BaalSin. I'm not sure about the designs, though. Ohtaka is the most inconsistent mangaka when it comes to different designs, so trying to figure out how the djinn equips work can cause major headaches. I tried to make his waist more skinny here because Ohtaka sometimes draws so skinny waists it looks almost unhealthy. The anime sort of corrected the weird shoulder-waist proportions and the characters look less anorexic, lol. You can say Sinbad is a relatively big muscular dude, but there are a lot of even bigger dudes in Magi. :B

Ok, I wanted to ramble some more, but I should go to sleep now. I have school tomorrow.

Figures and stuff

Eeep! Despite working full time, I must say I had a good week. I even managed to impress some people at work with my English. :D

Also, both packages I was waiting for arrived. The special edition of PH volume 20 with the chibi Gil figurine was delivered to me on Tuesday (November 12) and the Magi strap was delivered on Wednesday (November 13 - my "nameday" XD). Kyaaa~ Apparently, both were posted on November 1, so it took 11-12 days in total. Gil came from Ireland, Sinbad came from Canada. I honestly wasn't expecting the one from Canada to get here so soon, but it looks like Sinbad wanted to be on time for my nameday. XD

I took these photos with my cell phone after taking them out of the envelope and removing the transparent nylon wrap thing that was holding them together. Gil has a huge box for a 6 cm tall figurine, but I guess they had to make the box the same size as the manga volume.

Oh yeah, this limited special edition was my prize for winning a contest on tumblr with this.

Pandora Hearts volume 20 is actually one of my favourite PH volumes. Starting with a touching scene of Gilbert and Vincent and ending with a heart-wrenching scene... TT___TT It's the latest volume released in Japan, though volume 21 should come out sometime soon now. I'm so happy I have this volume, I usually just dream about owning such things, since I don't want to waste money on buying them for myself. Btw the full volume is a bit over 200 pages long including the extras.

Gil still in his box. I'm always too scared to take my precious figurines out of their packages at first, lol.

After I finally took him out. He's so cute. And I'm glad he's so tiny, I actually thought he'd be a bit bigger. There are a few small mistakes on him, for example he seems to have some barely noticeable scratch on his face, but otherwise he's the awesomest badass chibi Gil.

And here's my Sinbad strap/keychain. It was extremely difficult to get a decent shot of him, I might try again tomorrow when I can take photos in natural daylight.
This figure has a long story. Somebody I follow on tumblr was selling Magi merchandise and doujins to be able to pay for her dog's surgery and I've been considering getting another Magi charm since I won the Alibaba one back in February (it's really adorable in person, the photos don't look nearly as good as the actual thing). I originally wanted a Morgiana to accompany my Alibaba charm, but there are only Aladdin (derpy chibi version), Sinbad, Ja'far, Masrur and Sharrkan in this set of figurine straps. At first I didn't think of buying anything, but then I randomly checked my PayPal and I realized I had enough "leftover" money from commissions to buy one of these (+ shipping cost). So I was like I HAVE MONEYZ!! LET'S SPEND IT!! and that was it. Haha. Btw, Ja'far looked really cute too, but he was sold by the time I checked again. XD;
So yeah, I'm not regretting buying him because he's really adorable and very detailed for a tiny figurine. He's a higher quality figure than the ones of the series my Alibaba is from. Alibaba is more chibi and the seam line on his head bothers me, but they did the seaming on this Sinbad in a clever way and it's not that noticeable. There are some small mistakes in the painting, but this is pretty much unavoidable with such a tiny figure.
My family thought he was a girl, lol. Mom loves him more than Gil and Alibaba.
The only issue I have with this Sinbad is that I'd expected some fancier package after the Alibaba one being in the same kind of protective package my big Squall was in (plus a bag). Sinbad came with only a small transparent plastic bag and he was taken out of even that, wrapped in some paper instead.

And now a corner of my desk looks like this. XD The big Squall was a birthday present in 2009. This photo somehow turned out decent, I guess.

Umm... yeah. I wrote about my figures because I have no drawings to post, hahah... The only decent sketch I've done so far in November is a sketch of Kouen from Magi.

It's still unfinished and inaccurate. I've been working on this before going to work in the mornings. XD
This is Kouen's Astaroth djinn equip. I actually haven't seen too many fanarts of him in this form, not even on pixiv, even though I think it looks so good. It's kinda like a cross between Sin's Focalor and Baal and his element is fire, hnnng. Kouen's a beast.

I have no energy/time to draw, heeelp... X___x

Photos and some stupid things

Ok, so I decided to log in here again and ramble about stupid things nobody cares about. 8D My birthday was yesterday, it wasn't anything special, I got some money from relatives I'm not gonna spend on anything like always and I also got a new coat from mom. I finally uploaded the photos from my digital camera to the computer, so let's post a few things here...

I finally have a new keyboard. My old one was so old you couldn't read the letters and numbers on it any longer. I got this one in August as some kind of early b-day present, lol. It's fluorescent too.

 This is my 'monster' orchid. It was originally a birthday present for my grandmother, but it's in my room now. It's 4 years old now and it blooms from around April to September. When you see these in stores, they usually have about 3-6 flowers, but this one had TWELVE this year.

And these are my mother's violets. I have no clue what kind of positive energies the plants must be receiving in our apartment, but these babies just keep blooming non-stop. XD

The cherry trees were all cut out in September, though. *sad*

NOW THEN... let's post some sketches as well~

Waka!Sin + child!Ja'far sketchy from the end of September. Apparently, I have a fetish for these two. I actually prefer drawing them together like that instead of their adult versions. They are cuter, hahah~
This was a super fast sketch, but I thought it turned out okay for a super fast sketch.

This was my sketchy wip for this. I made a few changes in the process, but not that much. This contest was a good excuse for me to finally draw fanart for the Gilbert in Wonderland omake. :D

Doodle of some of my favourite guys~ I sort of copied these from official artworks and manga panels because I wanted to stick to the original styles. Magi is not as ugly as I first thought... FMA is still uglier... XD; Also, Roy and Sinbad are the same age, but Sinbad is like 10 cm taller, hahaha, shorty Roy~

EWWW, this is crap, don't look. I doodled this last week, it was originally Sin sitting with some drink in his hand, but I couldn't get his hand right and then somehow it turned into this. I can't anatomy, so blehheghugh. But I love this guy because he's totally in character even if you don't draw him clothes.

I'm gonna die tomorrow. Or not. But then I'm gonna die next week. X___x

Also, I'm randomly addicted to this song:

Oh yeah, and there's been too much Sinbad on this blog lately. I'll now write a small rant on this matter and I'm putting it under a cut for reasons...