posted byWizWag on May 14th, 2025

I finally have my own domain nearly one year after starting this site! The ability to just have a site on Neocities (or Nekoweb, or anywhere) is invaluable (even if you're relegated to a subdomain), but it just feels more real now. I kinda put this off for a little too long, thankfully the domain I wanted was available.

To celebrate this occasion, I made some minor adjustments to site formatting and added a new page to the site (being the sparsely populated stamp album). I wasn't sure where else to collect my stamps for the site, so I figured a new page would be appropriate. Little by little, the site comes together into something more complete. I normally don't make blog posts announcing site updates, but this one feels special.

Additionally, I'm on the Wizring now! The navigation controls are slapped right on my homepage, just on the bottom left. You can check out the other sites on the ring; they're all cool, and all quite magical in their own ways. While small, the selection is still pleasantly varied.

I'm aware that having your own domain is sort of the "baby's first step" of having a website, but I can't help but just feel excited about it; just having a site of your own can really feel liberating in the current age of Internet insipidity. I'm technically still in the Neocities neighborhood, but this place truly feels mine. I'm getting emotional just thinking about it.

posted byWizWag on May 7th, 2025

I have an old Wacom tablet that I very rarely ever use, until recently. I bought it around 7 years ago, messed around with Clip Studio for a few hours, and then allowed it to rest in its original packaging. Making art is a very tactile process, and because using the tablet didn't innately feel very good, I just stopped using it.

While on socials, I saw an ad for a set of True Grit Texture Supply digital brushes, and because I'm such a sucker for old print pastiche, curiosity overcame me. They offered some freebies, so I downloaded what I could and dusted off my old tablet. After finnicking around with the selection, I found a few brushes I really liked and experimented with them.

Tablet drawing still requires a bit of a rewire to my muscle memory though; I often tilt the tablet to get a better angle for my wrist, or scratch away as I would on paper, only for the tablet to awkwardly misinterpret my inputs. It's a tablet, so of course there'll be some unnatural quirks (I've never used a really nice expensive drawing tablet, I imagine they have some fancy programming/hardware that make them a little more intuitive to use), but it's still just not as fun to draw with as it is to draw physically (even if it can kinda emulate the end result).

The freebie pack also came with a few paper textures.

But it just turns out so cute! I absolutely love how this looks, even if I still have a lot to learn about digital art and these new tools. This whole thing has gotten me much more interested in using a tablet for digital art again, which I hadn't considered as a possibility. I'm actually eager to experiment with it even further.

posted byWizWag on April 17th, 2025

On the Internet, two terms have come to seemingly dominate the most popular creative spaces, being content and social media. Neither of these terms are new: content being used in such a way predates the Internet, and the term social media was first coined in the 90's (although by whom is debated), but I believe the discussion surrounding them remains relevant.

Instinctively, the term "content" feels disrespectful; it comes off as so abstractly diminutive, as though any given work of art, text, or video is just another Thing™ in the ThingBox™. Of course it's meant to be broad, but what does content mean in the context of art today? Likewise, "social media" just feels reductive. I mean, both of these terms are reductive and broad in scope (which in and of itself aren't bad things), but what effect is this having on the array of things that they've come to describe? Is it really fair or sensible to categorize and compare all art with advertisements, products, or works of otherwise commercial ends? You may not even do that, but a lot of people, especially people of great influence do.

The term "social media" is less egregious, and while its usage has had a similarly reductive effect on how we perceive various Internet communities, my largest complaints of social media are mostly practical; concerned instead with how specific social media platforms have influenced human expression on-platform to particular ends, mostly for profit or influence, and how the consequences of that have even managed to spread beyond the confines of their original platforms. A cute example would be the tendency for youngsters to say things like "unalive" or "grape" or whatever, as a result of word filters on TikTok and YouTube. Death, sexual assault, and suicide are not pleasant topics of discussion, but are we really going to treat these concepts with such disrespect, so as to not even dignify them with an explicit term outside of the thought gulags? Are we ever outside of the thought gulags? Are the TikTok word filters in the room with us right now? I feel like I'm losing my mind sometimes, not in Minecraft.

While admittedly cute, linguistic quirks like "self-delete" and the fourth-person pronoun "chat" are pernicious reinforcements of groupthink-dependent systems of influence. Even more outwardly degradatory is the way in which all social behaviors, not exclusively language, have become dominated by the cultural manipulation flowing downstream from these platforms. Bizarre manners such as making social media accounts for infants, excessive morality policing, and a commonplace appreciation for character assassination have bled out from the fringes of popular social media into the realm of "real world" normalcy.

Language (at least English, although I'm certain that all languages share this quirk in some way) tends to develop in such a way that the commonly understood definition of any commonly-used term will default to the lowest common denominator over time (if they retain usage at all). Think to how certain terms, that at one point described a particular subcategory of any given larger category, have over time come to mean anything within that category, at least colloquially. The absolute best example of this that I can think of would be the modern usage of the word boomer, which is classically defined by a relatively narrow window of time in which someone was born (the mid 1940's to the mid 1960's), later (as the boomers aged) coming to describe anyone perceivably old relative to the observer, and even later developing into a term of derision against anyone older.

Other good examples of language defaulting to the lowest common denominator over time are: -gate as a suffix pertaining to any sort of scandal or controversy (derived from the Watergate scandal), cancel being used as a politically-correct term for character assassination (derived from the #CancelColbert campaign), and gooner being used to describe any sort of sexual or suggestive behavior, content, or person (orginally referring to a participant of an extreme, pornography-dependent, fetish lifestyle).

In the context of art: the new, common, understanding of art as a product is an unfortunate consequence of the mass commodification of all expression, that I believe naturally developed as a result of content coming to define all forms of human expression on the Internet. Obviously, an orated speech wouldn't be considered content, but a subsection of an encylopedia would (because it's contained within a specific vehicle for expression), and naturally all expression on the Internet is content. And, with popular social media encouraging competetiveness in expression, all content becomes a vehicle for an end, whether that be attention, or profit, or whatever. All communication, found in all forms of expression in the popular social media ecosystem, is left to fend for itself in these gauntlets, the judges therein determining its worth as one would any other product in any other market. I believe this has extended beyond even the Internet, with common sentiment regarding artistic value largely hinging on the view that art is a commodity, or some other such thing that has purpose. This isn't to say that I believe that social media is the origin of the commodification of expression, but rather a central pillar in shaping public influence that expression is, above all, a commodity.

I don't believe that there is an inherent flaw with competetiveness, even in expression or art, but I believe the rules of engagement on popular social media platforms encourage an un-artistic approach to the artistic process, which in my opinion renders the art less valuable. This is not necessarily a condemnation of capitalism, or trade, or the concept of commodity.

This also isn't to say that competetiveness, popularity, or even celebrity status are byproducts, or dependent on the existence, of popular social media (because obviously these things existed before the Internet), but rather that popular social media reinforces these concepts as tenets or goals within its users in regards to common, everyday, communication. I believe this is bad for all human expression, but especially so for art.

And also, this isn't to say that popular social media cannot be used in a way that isn't competetive, or goal-oriented, but rather that it tends to be as a result of popular social media's reward systems. People naturally like attention, being popular and respected, and having a wide circle of influence; this fact is exploited by social media.

And finally, this isn't to say that using popular social media is bad, necessarily. Using social media for fun or profit isn't, in my opinion, inherently immoral or self-destructive. Market yourself, sell goods and services, I don't care; social media is, after all, the most efficient way to get yourself out there.

All that being said, I should clarify: art (or any expression) is, inherently, not a commodity (we can communicate to connect with others for psychological benefit, and oftentimes express ourselves simply for the sake of it, not necessarily for transactional reciprocity), and the value of any given work of art is not, in my opinion, found exclusively in goal-oriented philosophies. Of course, the discussion of artistic value is deep, and for the sake of brevity I'll leave it at this: social media produces a fast, stressful, environment for artists and encourages un-artistic ways of thinking. Your art will be better the less you care about the whims of your audience, and social media/content obsession makes it harder for artists to be genuine; just make whatever you want to make. I hope this all makes sense.

posted byWizWag on June 15th, 2024

A couple of years ago (okay, probably closer to like, ten) I felt frustrated. This was the sort of petty, autistic frustration that only a perpetually-online weirdo (like myself) can feel. I had noticed that many popular webcomics had developed with a very specific format: they were semi-autobiographical, slice-of-life, comics with the main character being an explicit authorial self-insert. They were also, of course, cartoony, i.e., unrealistic or hyperbolic for comedic or expressive effect.

Now, it wasn't the comics themselves that frustrated me; I have no issue with them, I have no issue with the format, and I think they can even be good. What frustrated me was the fact that this exceedingly popular format didn't really have a convenient, named, genre. Sure, I just used the terms "semi-autobiographical" and "slice-of-life" to describe this subset of comics, but "semi-autobiographical slice-of-life" doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.

But why not just use "slice-of-life"? It's basically what you're describing.

My response to this is that while slice-of-life is a suitable descriptor in most senses, it fails to accurately capture the way in which the main character is a self-insert for the author, and the way in which it is both autobiographical and fictional at the same time. To put it another way: all of these comics can be categorized as slice-of-life, but slice-of-life is far too broad of a term to completely describe this specific subgenre. These types of comics are, at their core, an amalgam of the semi-autobiographical and the slice-of-life.

Initially, I had internally named this subset of comics "visual journals". It made sense to me at the time, because these works were essentially some form of journalling with an obviously prominent visual element. However, I very recently discovered that "visual journal" is commonly understood to mean an actual journal (as in a daily journal or diary) that is drawn in or otherwise contributed to in an artistic way, such as painting, collages, etc.

So now I refer to it as SASOL (Semi-Autobiographical Slice-of-Life). I pronounce it "say-soul". Maybe "visual journal" was a better term, I don't know.

posted byWizWag on June 5th, 2024

Can you believe that I haven't forgotten about this site yet? In the last week or so I've been exploring various little sites on Neocities, and (surprisingly, but upon further thought, not really) so many are abandoned. One aspect of the older Internet (older as in pre-2010) that I had forgotten about was just how often sites sat dead.

Still, it's exciting to see newer sites and pages emerge. Browsing the Internet actually feels exciting when there's thought, care, and imagination involved. Isn't the point of the Internet to connect to actual people? I can't imagine an Internet without the element of free human expression that only a hand-built site can provide.

Moving forward, I'd like to update this site at least once a week; this place is still barren. Eventually, I'll be gone and this site will become inactive just like the countless sites, pages, and projects that came before it. Hopefully I can properly populate this place before then.

posted byWizWag on May 29th, 2024

Hello, this is my blog. I've been working on this site for the past day or so now, and it's coming along okay. It's looking a little boring, but I don't mind that. Some of the sites I've seen (on Neocities specifically) are very creative! But for now, I just want something that works.

In the meantime, I plan on developing this site further. Hopefully one day into something that could even be considered good. Stay tuned.