I decided to let go of the eye-straining magenta in favour of a mostly turquoise design :) Also introduced some other fixes to the style to make it a little tidier. For now the new theme is only on the mainpage but the other pages will follow soon.

Here's the old version for comparison. Hope it's at least a little better now.

-wilton

Nah, but anyway... Some moderately neat things have happened recently and I can't help being an oversharer so I thought hey, why not write a proper blog post (or more like... journal entry?) for once.

But first, I wouldn't be myself if I wouldn't whine a little. Last week was tough, both for personal reasons I wouldn't wanna discuss further anymore and because it was a non-stop hellish onslaught of uni assignments and group projects; I was just so exhausted from those goddamn 5 hr long crunch time discord calls as our underrested and overburdened teams rushed to submit our papers/presentations before their deadlines that I was secretly longing for a time when I can just finally shut everyone out and lie down and stop talking; it's not that I don't like those people, they're good friends, but... eh, y'know, I guess sometimes spending way more time than you'd like to talking to anyone can unintentionally make you grow tired of em. Or at least I feel that way; it's always good to just simmer down after a round of socializing every now and then and have some alone time... Hopefully not in front of a computer screen either.

Buuut the weekend brought a silver lining, as we finally had our first snowfall this year :D It was pretty brief but surprisingly heavy! Temperatures stayed sub-zero (Celsius, USA) for the rest of the day too, so it stayed at least until the next afternoon. The feeling and the sound of thick snow creaking under your boots as you walk is one of the few redeeming qualities of living on this wretched earth and I await it every year, crossing my fingers that we'll finally have a white Christmas too, to put an end to the lame rainy and/or cloudy streak of the last couple of years :)

However, as the snow melted away and it got a little warmer, I decided now was the perfect time to finally leave my dank cave and go for a little morning run after an extended hiatus. I'm the absolute opposite of a mornings person lol but I gotta say that there's nothing that wakes you up and energizes you better than a morning run (orr at least legally and without a prescription). So I dressed a little warmer than usual for my run and started jogging, listening to music through earbuds. It was already well past sunrise but you could still see a bit of an afterglow in the sky which was really pretty.

So how did ol' lady Fortune reward me for finally building up the resolve to move my bony ass from the couch, you may wonder. Or not. Probably not, but I can't shut up about it anyway. Well, as soon as I ran out of my neighbourhood and into a little bit more of a rural area, I saw 2 big dogs roaming the street freely for some reason. "Well, shit. I hope they don't come trotting and growling at me", I thought, exactly 1 second before they started trotting towards me and growling threateningly. A proud-looking German Shepherd and a good ol' friendly Mutt, both perfect height to take my balls as a trophy in one clean bite. My heart was beating like crazy. I quickly turned the music off to listen in on any audible cues as to what they're gonna do, pressing a button on my earbuds; and it seemed like the sudden movement of my hand agitated them more. I slowed down to a near halt and didn't really know what to do, as they started circling me slowly like some goddamn wolfpack closing in on weak prey. The Shepherd barked at me while the Mutt bared his teeth. I was looking at the ground as hard as hard one can look at the ground since I remembered hearing somewhere that you shouldn't ever look a stray dog in the eyes (at least not for too long) as they instinctively take it as a threat/challenge. Then, the most anxiety-inducing thing: the Shepherd grabbed the glove on my hand with his teeth. Luckily, it appeared to only be the probing or even playful kind of a soft bite that even well-behaved dogs may do every once in a while.

In the blink of an eye, I could already imagine an upcoming article on my local news website about a freak accident where a young man got mauled by 2 feral hounds. Buut I guess it wasn't my time to shine in the spotlight yet. I pulled my hand away from the Shep as quickly as I could and shouted HEY at the top of my lungs. This could have gone 2 ways, either freeze them in shock or make them turn way more agressive; once again luckily it was the former. They paused for a moment wondering what's going on and I took the opportunity to back away slowly, still avoiding their gazes. Once again, they were growling and staring at me, as if they were preparing to make a jump for me again. Eventually after what seemed like a few minutes but was probably like 10 seconds, I got to the 'eh, screw it' distance where they just turned away and went on to pursue more pushing business than ripping my Adam's apple out.

So, since I had no idea what I was doing... I either panicked too much at what was just some stray dogs tryna play with me OR I was really lucky. Either way, I haven't been running again since then due to laziness that I try to justify with minor mental trauma caused by the whole ordeal; Buut enough about 'em dogs since this is already shaping up to be a wall (if not a tower) of text. On an unrelated note... Santa came early and I finally got a real chair to sit at my desk on for the first time in my life :D It may not seem like that fun of a gift... a goddamn chair... but hell, I'm more excited about it than anything I got in the last couple of years. My spine and butt are especially thankful, cuz I've been sitting on a hard ass wooden dining room chair that was starting to fall apart up to this point.

To whoever's reading this - I hope this post finds your quarantined butt and spine in an equally comfortable position as mine while I'm writing it and I wish you a pleasant whatever-time-of-day-it-is-there and a reasonably snowy winter or reasonably sunny summer :) Ain't nothing better to wish for than a stable climate nowadays, eh...

-wilton

PS - oh, and if you're a dog owner... watch em, will ya? especially if they're like a meter tall

I added a sidebar to the right of the blog posts for buttons and webrings. Currently tryna think of what else I can put there. Perhaps a hit counter? Or a player of some sorts?

On a sidenote: Ok I ended up removing those 2 posts anyway, venting on my mainsite was embarrassingly bad judgment... This definitely ain't the place for it so I'll find somewhere else to put that kinda stuff next time.

-wilton

So it looks like I finally got most of what I wanted to work on the website, more or less... If you're reading this (hopefully on a computer because it kinda sucks on mobile lol), thank you for visiting :)

I'm wilton and this blog is my first little exercise in doin HTML/CSS from scratch and hopefully a nice place to put anything I make and enjoy doing. I know I may not be the most talented artist (actually... an artist at all) or web designer as you can see; but I can only learn by trial and error and I hope for it to one day be an archive I can look back on and smile at how bad I used to be at it; that is if I do ever end up making some progress lol... Either way, I've wanted to have a website ever since I could remember but I never got around to it until now, when I found out about neocities and this whole neat nostalgic community around it!

The design of the blog is (supposed to be) vaguely inspired by sploder.com which is a game making site I've spent the better part of my life on since I was 8, and one that I have more memories from than probably any friend group I've been in irl... Sadly it's probably gonna disappear soon enough as Flash ends its lifetime by the end of this year :( Which is why I wanted to immortalize some of my nostalgia in this way.

Anyway, now all I have to do to have the whole site fully up n running in the way I always wanted my blog to be like is to add a dream journal and iron out some wrinkles and it's good to go :D I can already encourage you to check out the song of the day page where I'm gonna try to put any newly discovered music that I like everyday, or to write something in the guestbook! I appreciate any sort of input, whether it's a simple hello or some critique or a music rec; It's always nice to read a message from someone from the other end of the world :)

-wilton