Yesterday I ignored my friend’s requests to hang out. I don’t want to hang out with B. anymore, and I’m hesitant to socialize.
Uh oh, I hesitated. Hesitation is a thing I wrote about a few days ago.
“Go slow and don’t hesitate”
Well, I did just that. I hesitated. I ignored their texts. I declined to play games with my older sister and my parents as well. Instead, I binged watched youtube and hung out in the VOCALOID discord.
It was a meh day. I barely talked in Discord. I hid my personality. I took it easy during my daily training. I scrolled through twitter and HackerNews repeatedly. A truly meh experience.
I gotta change my desktop background. Rin’s hips are distracting me.
Miku was drawn a little thicc in this wallpaper, which is fine. Thicc Miku is great, but it’s Miku’s traditional thin figure that I oogle over. Rin has that figure in this wallpaper, which draws my eye to her. Unacceptable!
Ok here’s what I switched to. A cute Miku X Luka wallpaper. I approve of this ship because they are the cutest couple ever!
Here, have some more kawaii kawaii Miku X Luka pics!
I’m probably going to fill up my VPS storage pretty quick, with all the pictures and video I’ve been throwing on here.
Oh well. This blog is important so it’s worth the cost. Luckily, storage cost just goes down over time. My backup of this blog which is saved on AWS cost just $0.20 a month. That’s pretty good. The blog itself runs on a $10 a month VPS. Not too shabby!
While we’re on the subject, if you’re looking for a quality Virtual Private Server provider, check out Vultr. I’ve been using them for about 5 years and I’ve never had any problems with their service. They even have an API for spinning up server instances. I use Ansible for that task. They have good documentation and features which match Digital Ocean.
Yeah I’ve got monetization on the mind. Yesterday, I added a WordPress plugin called Amazon Auto Links. It does what the title describes, it automatically adds amazon affiliate links to blog posts.
I’ve got some tweaking to do to how the links display. I think they’re too big; each link takes up too much vertical space. I would like six links to display in the space that one link currently occupies. Right now, it seems like the links are a main part of the blog post. What I want is just a small footer which contains a high concentration of product links which readers may be interested in purchasing.
So my blog totally just crashed. It did so when I tried to upload that screenshot. I was getting an error which mentioned that the database connection could not be established. I checked the logs and found out that mysql couln’t start because it was too low on memory!
I checked which VPS plan I was on. It turns out I was incorrect above when I pay $10 a month. I only pay $5 a month, and the VPS only has 1 Gig of RAM!
That’s too low for my use case, so I bumped up my plan to the 2 GB RAM VPS which cost $10 a month. I didn’t have to do anything else, migration wise. I could get an additional 5GB of storage if I resize my partitions, but I’m not in the mood to work on tech right now.
Right now is writing time!
I did some more drawing last night.
While I was watching YouTube, or reading chat in Discord, I would write something I heard that was meaningful, or draw something completely unrelated. I’m super stoked about how the Miku on the far left of the first image turned out. The Miku on the third image was actually something I drew a couple days ago.
Here is the reference image for the first Miku.
Luckily I tagged that image by renaming it to naruodo. Because of that, I was able to find it very quickly.
The next one comes from a MV that is very hard to find online.
For some reason, the artist or the publisher keeps removing the YouTube video, and replacing it with a shorter version. They’ve done it at least twice, so the full version is very difficult to find. Luckily, I’m a total Miku otaku, so I stopped at nothing to find the original length video!
Now that I think about it, I can’t remember where I found it.
The thing is, it’s unlike any other VOCALOID MV. The art style and the CG are really top notch. The outfits are fantastic as well.
Screenshots? Who am I kidding, I’m just going to share the entire video!
Oh my god, the video size is exactly 39 MB! Maybe that’s why the publisher removed their video a number of times? They could have wanted to get the filesize exactly right!
I guess I did a little more yesterday than I give myself credit for. I worked on a track I started a few days ago. I researched pop song structure on youtube and implemented a rough draft. It doesn’t have a good flow yet, but there are some solid sections, such as the chorus.
The chorus has a slight Christmas feeling. Christmas is over, wahhh! That’s too bad, because I just found a bunch of cute Miku Christmas fanart.
Small boobs for the win! In the first image, Miku’s got Luka size boobs. That’s so not correct! I wanna hug and squeeze Miku, and those huge bubs would just get in the way!
Well I’m pretty much outta things to talk about. Show and tell is over, everyone go home!
Ok so no really, I guess I will just do the writer’s way method. Prepare for shit to go south! The goal here is just to write non-stop. The idea is to come up with a writer’s flow, and it usually ends up being garbage. But the thing is, there is usually some good shit hidden in garbage. Like when a home owner throws away a perfectly good item, because they don’t want it.Ok so no really, I guess I will just do the writer’s way method. Prepare for shit to go south! The goal here is just to write non-stop. The idea is to come up with a writer’s flow, and it usually ends up being garbage. But the thing is, there is usually some good shit hidden in garbage. Like when a home owner throws away a perfectly good item, because they don’t want it.
They could have sold it on eBay or taken it to Goodwill, but they’re lazy af. So they just throw it away and get it out of sight, out of mind.
Then the trash man comes along with their big 5 ton truck. Are trash trucks 5 tons? Maybe they’re more. Maybe they’re less! I have no focking clue.
I watched a documentary last night about a woman who’s legs never stopped growing. They were so huge! and her upper body looked so thin! It was really incredible. But no really, her foot was the size of a…. I struggle to think of anything relatively close to her feet size.
Like the size of a treasure chest. Like holy shit. Her upper body looked thin, maybe too thin, and her butt down looked like a morbidly obese person’s legs. 600 pound obese type of person.
I can’t stand looking at fat people. Call it shallow, call it whatever, but fat people are incredibly repulsive to me. B. is like that. Fat and mean. Two repulsive attributes which equal one ended friendship.
We were friends for a year, which tells you that I can put up with fat people. But fat and mean? Bye.
Ok let’s not talk about that right now. I talked about it previously and I don’t want to get into it again.
I wonder what attributes people see in me that are repulsive. My mood is probably often repulsive. I’ve got a resting murder face, and I rarely want to be where I’m at when I’m out of the house. I think that shows on my face and in my body language, and I can’t imagine people would want to be around me when I’m like that.
I’ve got bad breath! I haven’t been to the dentist in years, and that’s giving me one more reason to avoid people. I try to cover up my bad breath with gum or breath strips.
I bet the fact that I’m in love with a VOCALOID who appears as a teenage girl is repulsive to some people. But that’s not going to stop me. The only thing that will get in the way of our love is what I feel.
Did I talk about vulnerability yet? I was assigned the task of listening to a TED talk by Brené Brown. She’s a therapist and she studied how people make connections. Her findings show that allowing yourself to being vulnerable is essential for this.
Vulnerability is the birthplace of joy, creativity, belonging, and love. Vulnerability is the act of letting go. It’s the most accurate measure of courage!
Brené studied people who feel that they have a strong sense of love and belonging, and she found some common traits. They believed that they are worthy of love and belonging. They believed that what made them vulnerable made them beautiful.
So yeah, I don’t allow myself to be vulnerable, and I suffer because of it. I don’t allow myself to be vulnerable, which means I cannot form deep relationships, or feel like I belong.
But there’s a formula for me to follow, which I can use to feel vulnerable.
- Let myself be deeply seen.
- Love with my whole heart, even with no guarantee.
- Practice love and joy in moments of terror
- Believe that I’m enough.
The first thing I think about when I think of my own personal vulnerability is how I hide when I’m at work.
I was washing the inside of a window on Friday. A worker outside walked up and cleaned the outside of a window in the next room. Instead of moving to that same window when I was done with the one I was on, I leapfrogged to the room after.
This is uncomfortable to talk about. I’m feeling VULNERABLE.
Vulnerability is not weakness. Vulnerability is our most accurate measure of courage
Brené Brown
Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity, and change.
Brené Brown
I want change in my life. I want significant change. I want the courage to follow my dreams, and do things that are hard. I want to be okay with myself when I’m talking to people. I want inner confidence and an unshakable sense of self.
I just killed an ant that was walking on my screen. It’s important to stop an invasion before it ever starts! Kill the scouts!
Well I guess my next challenge is to convince myself that I’m worthy of love and belonging. And that what makes me vulnerable makes me beautiful.
Let me explore that a little bit.
The first part, feeling worthy of love and belonging, seems simple enough. The concept is simple, I mean. Actually feeling that way is a different story.
That reminds me of something my mom shared with me at some point. She was trying to bring me back to god or whatever. She said the first step in having faith is wanting to believe.
That sentiment didn’t do anything for me because I don’t want to believe that there is a sky ghost in charge of everything. I don’t want to be a subject to their authority, so that was just another nail in the coffin that I put religion inside.
But the thought that believing in something is as simple as wanting to believe is rather powerful. I want to believe that I am worthy of love. I want to believe that I’m worthy of belonging. As long as the group I’m belonging to doesn’t suck, of course!
The second part of the gaining a strong sense of love and belonging is that I have to believe that what makes me vulnerable makes me beautiful.
Do I believe that right now? No, not at all. I feel vulnerable when people look me in the eye, or simply say hi to me. I feel flawed and broken regarding that topic, not beautiful.
So I guess the first step towards that part is the same as the first part? Simply desire the outcome?
I desire to believe that what makes me feel vulnerable makes me beautiful.
There, I said it aloud. I meant it when I said it. Wait, maybe not. Let me repeat it a few times and ponder on what it really means.
…
I want to believe that what makes me feel vulnerable makes me beautiful.
I’m still not sure. Vulnerable is a word that’s hard to relate to. I looked it up in a thesaurus and here are some words that make more sense to me.
Unguarded, exposed, unsafe. (WordHippo)
Accessible, defenseless, weak. (Thesaurus.com)
Wow, that’s what vulnerable means? That’s crazy! So when I’m feeling weak and exposed, that’s a feeling I should really embrace. Those feelings, if allowed to flourish, will open me up to joy, creativity, belonging, and love.
I want to feel loved. I don’t have that feeling very often. I could use more love in my life.
I think I’ll end this post here. I will have to contemplate how I can process vulnerability differently, accept vulnerability…
For now, I’ll end with some words of gratitude.
I’m grateful for H., who gave me a Trader Joe’s gift card for Christmas.
I’m grateful for Hatsune Miku for creating Minecraft.
I’m grateful for S. on the VOCALOID Discord who never seems to run out of energy and always keeps things interesting.
I’m grateful for mom, who has showed me more love than anyone else in my entire life.
