I hope the holiday season is treating everyone well. it's a bit overdue, but should it interest you, please allow me to indulge and share my thoughts on the past year.

I'm a normally very reserved person. even if I'm inclined to speak my mind its not often that I get the luxury to pause and use the journal function on this site for its intended use.

firstly, thank you. I feel incredibly lucky to look back and say it has been largely a successful year. your support has meant and still means the world to me!

every commission, all the kind comments and nice things that people have to say about my work, down to even artwork and page views, and maybe most important of all- the things I can't see nor quantify, things like word-of-mouth recommendations, for all these things I truly can't thank you enough. to my clients, thanks you so much for supporting this silly little bat.

I have finally upgraded to a desktop! it is as if I had been eating a bowl of soup with a tiny spork before the upgrade, whereas now I have a nice, deep soup spoon like the kind they give you with ramen. the highest-end of pc builds in this metaphor is obviously a boba straw.

I've been enjoying using blender and csp at a capacity I haven't been able to. before, any large-scale, rendered 3d thing I've used in my art had been rendered on my roommate's pc. (we've also finally, finally, fixed our roof leaks, hurray)

and of course, games I wouldn't even consider buying before, I can kind of flirt with the idea of getting now. kind of.

the rest of this journal is me whingeing about the sad state of mh wilds optimization.

there's so much I could write here about my relationship with this franchise. early this year it had become one of my biggest motivations, if not the primary one, to upgrade to a better pc. The first time I've went on a hunt was when I played unite on my cousin's psp, played a bit of 3G on my laptop through an emulator (through means I may or may not endorse) and played a fuck ton of world and rise on my roommate's ps4 and pc, respectively.

that motivation has largely fizzled out closer to the release. it just seemed like an insurmountable goal. that feeling was crystalized when the benchmark tool released, and if my roommate's pc could barely handle it, what kind of monster pc build would I need? But then the open beta rolls in, and I find out that everyone's struggling to run the game. I was among the people who believed that its just the old beta build and not indicative of the final game.

when I was deciding on what specs I wanted, I was partly using wild's system requirements as a guide. yet even with a 12th gen i5 and a rtx 3050 (well above the recommended (if I got the right idea of which specs are better)) the benchmark tool still struggles at the lowest settings.

If I had been a little more patient, I could've probably gotten an i7, but from what I can tell, it hardly makes a difference. last I checked the game is still cpu intensive, and the idea of tu4 somehow magically lowering the spec-gate seems all but likely.

I think I'll just wait for when the expansion comes, like I did with rise. its a shame how it turned out especially after world, but I find myself thinking about wilds less and less as the year closes. if you think that's a 'sour grapes' reaction, I agree with you. It just sucks because the grapes did end up being sour when I was rooting for them to be sweet.

that's all I have to say about mh for a good while. If I'm coming across as particularly miffed about the whole thing I do apologize. I really am having a blast with the new pc- that and being able to take it easy this December. I'm currently consumed with zootopia and pawbert tiktok edits. I truly cannot wait to buy the movie on youtube or something and watch it every day till it's sick of me.

speaking of, I'll end it here. happy holidays! xoxo

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special thanks goes to:

 diffusemoose
 Senpaiithon
 CabbageSquares

this journal would be completely different without your contributions! thank you once again!