Winter Daze

 We got our first snowfall the other day. Not a lot, maybe around an inch or so. Most of it had already melted by the time I took my partner to work at nine the next morning, and it had completely disappeared by the time I left for work at two. Fortunately, though, the roads weren’t iced over.

As much as I dislike winter, I do like when it snows. The austere beauty that overtakes the landscape never ceases to amaze me, and something about the silence it brings is so comforting, like being wrapped in a blanket. That sort of feeling has been very much needed the past week or so.

Nevertheless, we persist. I’ve been toeing the extremely fine line between staying aware/informed and staying sane, because rationally I know panicking about every single thing will ultimately amount to nothing good but I want to, very irrationally, curl up into a little ball and sleep for the next few years.

I’ve been limiting my time on social media. I’ve already kind of dropped off quite a bit regarding activity, but the constant stream of madness seems like as good an incentive as any to reduce screen time. Lately I’ve just been giving a few minutes here and there, amounting to around an hour or so (give or take) per day.

You’d think this would provide ample time to dive into all my little projects, but instead I’ve been indulging in video games. I got Oregon Trail for my Switch and have been really enjoying it, and I picked up Animal Crossing Pocket Camp Complete and have been having a lot of fun with that as well. I’ve also resumed crochet and have started a few little projects. Being able to work with my hands helps a lot, and having to count (and recount) my stitches helps calm my mind.

That said, the year marches on regardless and I’ve been feeling the itch to work on my art projects again. This year we’ll finally get to a really juicy chapter of Saffron Wave!! I’ve been dying waiting to work on this one and I can’t wait to share it with you all in a few months!

I’ve also been working on another short comic for ComicFury Zine, they changed their application process this year and require completed submissions before applications open, so I’m trying to give myself a good head start so I can balance that and Swave as we head into spring.

Which leads us to the website! I really want to get this thing finished, lol. Now that I’m on a consistent work schedule again and am getting back in the creative groove, I want to set some time aside for finishing the website. Aside from taking care of the half-complete pages, I want to add a bunch of art to the rest of the site. I’m an artist, for cryin’ out loud, I don’t wanna limit the art to just the gallery page. The downside to that, however, is that I still need to make most of that art.

I do have some art I need to prioritize asap from a raffle I hosted on bluesky, but once I get those taken care of I can work the website art into my free time a lot easier.

I also have a lot of work I want to do on the Saffron Wave website, I’m still so grateful for the Spiderforest team’s help getting everything up and running for me, but a lot of the site still feels really empty because I haven’t made time to add in all the extra stuff yet. At the very least I want to get the about page sorted, which will include a blurb about me and a (hopefully) brief overview of the Minoans so readers can have more context about the culture & setting of the comic. I’m also working on finishing up the script for chapter 5 so I can start roughing out pages, so it’ll be a while before there’s anything art-wise to share.

If I had a point in making this post, I think it’s basically just to sum up that I’m still here despite my lack of activity on social media, and I’m still working on stuff (just behind the scenes for right now).

Thanks for sticking around! I’ll see you soon~

Baby Steps are Still Steps

 When I'd started building this site I'd been debating if I wanted to buy a domain. Generally I don't mind URL's that are some flavor of [name].[website].[com] but since this site is my new home and portfolio I felt like maybe this would be the time to finally take that leap and give myself a .com name.

I wasn't quite able to make up my mind until I saw that on bluesky you could have custom domains for your user handle instead of the standard [name].bsky.social and that was what tipped the scale.

So I now officially own kellerybird.com!!

The slight downside is I now need to order new business cards and stuff lol

I'm planning to finish up more of the site starting next month, I've been really dogpiled by projects and deadlines on top of starting a new job a few weeks ago so I haven't had much free time this month. I want to expand the comics page to include future projects I've been chipping away at here and there and flesh out a few more things (like fixing up the gallery page).

I likely won't be able to make any new art for the site for a while still, so that will probably be one of the last things I do before I consider the site completed.

It doesn't feel or look like I've been doing much here this past month, but I've been doing a lot behind the scenes so I am still making progress.

Hopefully next month will have slightly more exciting news.

Website updates 9/21/24

 The hyperfixation has waned but the fixation is still there, lol.

I've updated the about page, the comics page, and added a resume page listing all my current and completed works.

The plan is to eventually ditch carrd and just use neocities for my website/portfolio. Carrd has been nice but it's really limited with what I can do visually, where as neocities, while I don't know much about coding, I know enough and have looked up what I don't know and it's already miles beyond what I was able to do with my carrd site.

All I've got left as far as building the site is to flesh out the links page, fix a couple things in the gallery, and figure out what the heck I wanna do with the home page.

I wanna add some more art to the site, but everything I want to add needs to be drawn so I likely won't get to any of that until maybe this winter. I've just got too much on my plate for autumn with 3 zines on top of normal comic stuff so I'm not expecting much wiggle room until like... late November after all my zine deadlines + recovery time.

That's it for now, I'll check back in when I make more updates to the site~

Back in the Groove

 Sure has been a while, huh?

I feel like whenever I start these new website-y endeavors some shit happens that knocks me on my butt for a good chunk of time. And so, here I am, dusting off this barely-used blog after over a year.

I'm reviving it largely because I'm building a new website for myself on Neocities, and thought integrating my posts from here would be a good way to keep an active blog on the new site (somewhat). It's just a widget so clicking on any post will open a new tab to the main post here, but until I can figure out something else this will suffice.

So what's been going on with me?

A lot, actually.

My mom passed away last year (which is a large part of why I haven't touched this place since I first set it up). My partner and I have moved 3 times in the last 14 months. We've adopted another cat. I got a new-to-me car. I've applied to and been rejected from several potential promotions at work. I started another webcomic in addition to Saffron Wave. I got accepted into 3 zines that all have a very similar timeline so I'm crazy busy this autumn (why am I like this). Saffron Wave got accepted into the SpiderForest Webcomic Collective so it also has a shiny new site. And I'm building a new website for myself for my portfolio & stuff.

Somehow I've managed to keep my head above water and keep everything under control.

Now that I've built enough of the website that the hyperfixation has released me, I can get back to work on the 3 thousand comics I have to draw by the end of October. I'll update things here periodically, I've got too much on my plate right now to even thing about blogging on a regular schedule.

The Final Rush of Summer ☀️🌻

It’s late afternoon in late July. It’s hot, but not unbearably so like it was last week when my partner and I discovered the cats had turned on the heater (we live in California, it’s not unusual for it to get so disgustingly hot it renders any a/c almost pointless). My partner is watching a movie in the living room. I’m sat in the bedroom listening to music via headphones that I’m not actually wearing and staring at my iPad screed. One cat is hiding under the bed, and the other has tucked herself between my sweaters in my closet. I start work at my new-old job on Thursday, so I’ve got maybe a day and a half left of freedom.

I should probably turn the volume down if I can hear my music clearly without wearing my headphones.

I’ve been seeing a lot of content about autumn, and while I can absolutely understand folks’ mindset and desire for cooler weather and the best holiday ever, I can’t help feeling like summer is getting the short end of the stick.

Summer is probably the worst season. It’s hot, disgusting, and, depending where you live, prone to natural disasters like wildfires. The days are gloriously long, but when it’s triple digits out there’s no desire or inclination to really do anything so the days feel wasted. All kinds of bugs come and hang out and terrorize you, energy bills increase because you run any kind of cooling device you can get your hands on, and if you’ve got kids you have to deal with them all summer long. Or, well, regarding that last point I only assume that’s what it can be like, having no kids of my own and only drawing on people sharing their experiences on other social media lamenting finding activities for their kids to do while on break from school.

But I digress.

I’ve spent a lot of time rebuilding my relationship with summer, and seeing everyone dismiss it in favor of autumn (which, again, I totally get) has been really upsetting this year.

Summer, for the longest time, was the season I hated the most. A season of endings, isolation, and misery bookended by drives through the sun-dried golden grass framing California’s highways. Maybe that’s why it’s called the golden state.

Long story short: my parents divorced when I was a kid and I spent over half my life being shuttled between the two at the start and end of every summer as per the custody agreement. Given the situation, I wasn’t able to spend any summers with my friends until adulthood, and it wasn’t quite the same because we were all either working or looking for jobs. I never really got the “aimless, endless, friend-filled, adventurous summer days of youth” you see depicted in movies and stuff, so I hated summer. This season is also simultaneously touted as being both "lazy" and "hectic", between long, languid days and people scrambling to take advantage of vacation time, and I don't think that's helping with people's dislike. Even I'm busy in the wake of my impending employment. This summer I moved house, quit my old job and searched feverishly for a new one, dealt with a problem with my old bank, worked on my webcomic, and even put together a few YouTube videos. And that's not counting all the visits and outings with friends and family now that we've moved back and get-togethers don't entail a four hour round trip in the car. It can get so hectic and I think people long for shorter days and cooler weather so they can justify not doing anything.

It wasn’t until recently, actually, that I began to really enjoy summer.

Seasonal depression definitely had a hand in that, my energy seems to fade as the days grow shorter and colder, but I think a lot of it comes from simply growing and changing as a person and having time finally separate me from the loathsome summers of my adolescence.

As an adult, I had money and freedom that I could've only dreamed of as a kid. Well, within reason, anyway. The whole "gotta work to pay the bills" thing takes priority but that's not the point I'm trying to make.

Being able to do what I like whenever I like without being inherently bound to someone else's schedule or finances was life-changing. I could go to the movies alone, take myself out to eat, do this and that whenever I pleased so long as I had money for it. Compared to a rather regimental childhood of not being allowed to do much of anything without a family member tagging along, I felt free as a bird.

Summer started to mean beginnings.

Especially so three years ago, when my partner and I moved to the Bay Area.

That was... not the best though. We struggled a lot almost the whole time, either financially or mentally or --worse-- both, we lived with people we didn't necessarily like or get along with, it was just... not what we expected.

Granted, my expectation of "living in the Bay Area" was still very much built upon my shattered dream of going to art school in San Francisco. As you can imagine, that had set some pretty high expectations, maybe moreso because I never got to go to art school in SF so I fantasized about it a lot, that were absolutely not met when we moved. Rather than a glamorous Victorian house or kitsch apartment somewhere in the city, we lived in a crummy development in the middle of a kinda crummy part of Pittsburg. Rather than cool, creative people who wanted to hang out and be friends, we lived with loud gamers and their puppy who spend 98% of their time in their rooms.

I could list all my unreasonable expectations and standards for ages, so I'll curb things there.

My point is, that's over and we're getting a fresh start this summer. Our lease in the Bay has ended, my partner and I moved into a tiny apartment in our hometown (that we don't share with other people!), we're both about to start working again, and life is finally moving forward. It's like waking up from a three year long nightmare now that summer is here again.

People are always banging on about autumn and Halloween this time of year, and while I'm excited for them too I'm so, so grateful for summer. Without summer and it's insufferable heat and busyness, I don't think people would turn to cool, crisp, chill autumn with nearly the same amount of love and adoration.

Without summer to usher us into the darker half of the year, would we look forward to it as much? Rather than rush through summertime, I want to relish it while I can. I'll be all the more grateful for autumn for it.