overcoming procrastination

well... took me long enough to add anything to this site, didn't i? needless to say, i did not intend for this to take so long, but life got dramatically worse just a month after launched the remodel of the site. i got out of training and was thrust into the special kind of hell that call centers bring about. everytime i thought i was finally able to breathe, another wave crashed on my head and i drowned once more. its hard to think about doing any projects i'd been dreaming to accomplish when i couldnt even keep food down, let alone relax with games. may write the details of this another time, but more than likely those times will only remain within my journaling, safe from others judgement.

thankfully, as of a couple months ago, i am no longer working @ that call center!!!! i still feel like that wave is going to hit me again at any moment. but hey, new job is going well, ive felt 'better' over a longer span of time than i did at the last place and have not experienced any crashes yet.

i was initially beginning work on the site again just after i left the old position, but i fell back into my old procrastination habits once again. part of me forgives myself for that, i've never experience that amount of stress over a long period of time before, so my body and mind desperately needed any rest it could get. at the same time, this unfinished site hanging over my head was really getting to me. its been said by many close friends that i am incredibly bad at finishing any project (if i even start it at all). if i let another big project fall through the cracks again, that's one more bullet of ammo my self-hate can use against me.

besides trying to win a battle against myself, its also so that i can try to enjoy things to their fullest. all my life, ive done nothing but consume, and never created. which is fine, most people do that and are more than satisfied with that. however, my ability to enjoy any media/hobbies i like has greately diminished, and i desperately want to change that. i think writing about my experiences with things could potentially help with that. plus, i really love older web aesthetics, so this brings out my ability to do artistic things that ive rarely done since high school. maybe others will end up enjoying reading this too, who knows?

that doesn't really tell the *how* i overcame my procrastination regarding this site, though. when i finally got around to trying to write a rough-draft post on the site, i realized that the way i had my pages coded would eventually become a bandwidth-hogging mess. think spaghetti-code but with a webpage- the css/styling was pasted onto every page. if i wrote dozens of blog posts, that'd easily take up a lot more space than necessary. no way i can let that slide!

so i decided to fix up sadgrl's code to suit myself, and then realized i understood none of what she wrote minus the basics. that alone made me procrastinate a bit longer. a few days into my new job, i learned that i would have chunks of downtime that i could do with as i wished. so i decided to try and learn more intermediate css via freeCodeCamp and write notes on all the stuff i didnt know, instead of wasting my time on the basic "This is how you make an HTML doc! This is how you make a paragraph! Here's how to do bold text!". this has been my most successful attempt so far on breaking out of the dreaded "tutorial hell". after a few weeks of small bursts of learning CSS, i finally took a look at the code again and voila! i can actually understand everything/quickly google anything i don't!

there are still a few things i want to change here (i think learning a little javascript could improve the spaghetti html going on with the scrolling banners/gifs up top, right now i don't have any other way to get around that...). im not about to let something like that get in the way of me updating the site + posting this though! i waited too dang long, i wanna write about the cool games i'll be devouring on my steam deck (which is being delivered imminently!!), share the things ive learned (i plan on uploading my CSS notes here, in case it ends up helping others), attempt to make nice art, and hopefully the process of that will help make me happier in some sense

anyway, i won't tell you what to expect, never know when life will take another bad and/or busy turn, but i'll see ya whenever i post again, hopefully sooner than last time!

--crystola--