January 4, 2025

Hope the days make sense again next week

January 3, 2025

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I'm coming to you live, asthmatic, and exhausted this first Friday of the year!

I'm getting over a bout of bronchitis (I get it....multiple times a year and have since I was a kid) and am highkey just thankful it's not that other one that I've seen going around. A couple of things!

1. Highlights Foundation has been incredibly kind in allowing me to come this year since I had such bad bouts of asthma related sicknesses/money problems all last year.

I'm hoping to raise enough money so I can go up there and work on an interactive fiction piece within my Black Girls Deserve Better series! You can donate and share here or on ko-fi!

2. 2025 bingo

I won't share all of my goals for 2025 because a lot of them are pretty personal but having the bingo idea already puts me several months ahead because I just wrote out my goals which usually doesn't happen til June if I'm lucky. A few I'd like to highlight are:

• create a full stop motion short
• better asthma control plan
• write 10k towards story
• read five books that change me
• write monthly posts to buttondown

I'm focusing on making them attainable so that I can feel good about myself throughout the year (it never occurs to me that life can feel mostly good if I keep at it sometimes). I know that at least four of those I could throw myself into doing by October and still get it accomplished and that gives me room to fail and to fail in a way that still serves me. I'm working on writing smaller steps for each of them (shout out to my gf) and taking it one movement at a time instead of barreling headfirst as per usual. Will report back!

3. Streaming ¹

I was able to get refurbished equipment (my referral code is: 008dc9bf2f796035 if you're into that) so I could stream without freaking out every two seconds that something was going to break down and a bonus is my monitor adjusts so we may be minimizing the potential of my neck and shoulders doing a quarterly painful lockup! I was hoping to use most of December to really plan and update my schedule/creation process for streaming but a lot of the time has been spent doing other things and that's making me wonder how much I like streaming. To be honest, I love streaming because my friends usually check it out and I love having a personal archive of how I experienced something at any given point in time so I probably will keep streaming, I'm just focusing on how to minimize the amount of anxiety/stress I put myself through with doing it.

If you wanna share how streaming works (or doesn't work) for you, what you enjoy about it, or any of those thoughts I'd like to hear them!

4. Health Justice Commons

If you've heard the talk, It's AWESOME to be Cripplepunk, I did with my friend from Aldercone Studio at Game Devs of Color last year, you might know that I've recently gotten more information about how to navigate my asthma and how terrifying it's been to realize things are much worse than I originally thought. I'm hoping to spend some more time checking in with my body (shout out to Finch App and taking better care of it, even as I struggle with getting that gucci gucci health insurance cause homies we making it through this year and decades upon decades to follow so leggo. One of my short-term goals is to get my inhalers regularly (monthly) so I'm not stressing about it.

5. The Substance - Girl, That's Scary! featuring Nay Bever

I'm probably on my fourth or fifth re-listen of this episode and one of my absolute favorite things is something Nay says:

"To me the message of this is it can and will be worse and you're not even grateful for what you have right now and you're gonna miss it. [...] I remember reading this poem that's like no matter what you believe about the afterlife or you believe you just die or whatever the case may be, you will not have the body you have right now and if you have any kind of consciousness you will miss it. Because you know your body so intricately, in a way that no one else does. Like you could put in an earring in your third pierced hole in your ear without even a miss. Your muscle memory, your knowledge of your own body is so deep. And sure, there's stuff everybody hates about their body and whatnot but when you don't have it anymore you'll be like "Wow, maybe I did like her.". "

and Image Description from Dott on Letterboxd a review of The Substance that reads: i am fucking speechless. i think every tik tok, instagram, etc baddie/girlypop/demure/mindful poster should be legally required to watch this movie before getting into a debate about makeup or cosmetic plastic surgery. what a fucking MASTERPIECE of the motion arts. // it's fucking hard to love yourself. it'll be the hardest thing you've ever had to do. but you still have to do it. you can't let go of her. don't you understand? you already know her, you know her without the mask. she's YOU. you have to be kind to yourself, okay? do you really hate her so? do you really think she deserves that? as much as she's been through, as hard as she tries?

because caring about my body is one of the hardest things (which is probably true for a lot of people but it doesn't always feel like it). My weight is never consistent because my history with food is erraticly erroneous² at best, I dissociate so much that I often can't tell what's happening to my body in the moment, internalized ableism and fatphobia try to curb stomp me when I least expect it, and alexithymia has me penning people love letters three days late because it's taken that much time for me to integrate everything that's happened. I don't entirely know what's going to be going on for this journey to feel _successful, but I'm pretty sure it starts with drinking more water, and stimming instead of suppressing, and not cursing myself when looking in the mirror. Nay's quote has been rumbling through me and so I keep trying to appreciate the seemingly small things (but small things make the big things so). Like, right now my nose isn't stuffy which I would've paid THROUGH THE NOSE (ha) for two days ago. And my neck and shoulders aren't seized up like a month ago. And my clothes fit today. Those are all worth celebrating if not at the very least acknowledging with a moment of gratefulness. I'm trying to do these more. I hope it helps.

6. Baffling Magazine Year Three

My subscriber copy of came in and it's lovely! I'm really excited to get into the flash stories here and I'm happy to report that I still love my lil story "It's Just A Date" with all my heart. You can grab a copy here.

7. LIBRARIES

I am extremely proud to announce that I am free of the duolingo stalker bird! That green bird of unearned guilt and shame is BANISHED from my life and it is wonderful. I was pretty stressed I didn't have an alternative because clozemaster also has chatgpt used on it and the other ones I've tried before but didn't love but HERE COMES THE LIBRARY TO SAVE US ONCE AGAIN! Turns out I get Mango Languages through my library and you should see what y'all get too because I'm also about to get in on some documentaries through Kanopy, even more language lessons through Transparent Language and of course, still reading my books through Overdrive (I finished my first book of the year and you can check out my lil journey through StoryGraph.

8. Ren'Py and Small Game Making

I made a small game for my girlfriend and finished it a couple of days ago and learning how to finish things is definitely something I'm gonna lean into this year. I was overwhelmed from the start because I didn't know quite what I wanted to do and I think that I can magically understand things out of nowhere so I was making more and more features to add to it. I spent a lot of time worrying though because when I started I learned my lack of being able to do certain things in a certain time frame determined what I was going to do very quickly! It's not the best thing I've made and I can definitely tell where I need to grow, but it's created and it exists and that's better than anything I could imagine because it's real.

That's what I'm going for this year: making things exist and real (and holding on to those types of things) instead of losing myself in the what-ifs of it all.

Odds & Ends

Something that keeps me from writing/posting these is that I'll have something I want to share but not paragraphs of reflection on it yet. So I'm just gonna add these here and we can vibe (you can also choose not to vibe):

• 2025 Forthcoming Poetry Books by Queer Poets of Color by Luther Hughes of Shade Literary Arts
• 76 Notable Debuts by Trans, Nonbinary, and Gender Non-Conforming Authors in 2024 by Jen St. Jude
• Artist Opportunities: January and February 2025
• "If the etiology is known, it's a disease. If no one has a clue, it's a disorder." Johanna Hedva, How To Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom
• Kaiju's Big List of Queer Visual Novels You Should Try

Destroy the systems that seek to destroy you! We're all we got!

A parting video: The preview is boo-boo but it's not a jumpscare. It's a video essay about animation before computers!

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