manymanythoughts

[manymanythoughts]

Hoooooly shit. I swear I’ll catch up with this blog fairly soon, but in the meantime, I finished my second journal, which is buckwild to say.

While my first one held about a year and a half of entries (with less pages, even), this one got filled in less than a year! I wasn’t expecting that.

There’s technically about 9 pages left (from last entry to back-matter) but I knew it wouldn’t be enough to get through November, so this one got finished up October 31st.

[manymanythoughts]

OH right the reason I started writing about changing journals: its such a huge fucking pain to find ANY inspiration for ending a journal? like i did some boolean operators on that goddamn search and no dice. put stuff like "finish up", "wrap up", "end" as required keywords, nix the words that kept coming up, like "set up", "new year". Google, why the FUCK was i still getting new journal setup videos.

Anywho, with my new plan, I don't need to think too long and hard about a year-end spread. Just like the first spread of this second journal, finishing up 2020 was just as important as starting 2021, and I think I can put some 'year in review' stuff in the 2022 journal instead of the in-between journal, yknow?

[manymanythoughts]

Okay, ya gorl is about to do some uploading of spreads and the like, but I gotta mention:

I'm almost done with this second journal. I'm in mid-october, and I basically have like, 10 more usable pages before I need to think about the back matter for it.

What I'm thinking of doing is finishing the year up in a different journal with no fanfare, since it's really not worth doing the whole to-do of reflections and such, just to do it again for the new year in two months.

This journal just gets an index (which would also mean I have more pages open, less would be filled with back matter), and October continues/November starts in a journal without a fancy setup.

This is at least partially bc I wanna save the 'take chances, make mistakes, get messy' journal for a new year's start, not just kinda. awkwardly slump into it near the end of the year.

yeh, as I've been writing this, I talked myself into it. there's the plan, I guess lol

[manymanythoughts]

Oh boy! I know I haven't kept up with this blog well, but I'm pretty sure I have plenty of pictures to use to go back through the month spreads, at the very least.

the call I've finally made re: using others' purchased work on this blog, is that I'm making no money from it, so as long as I give credit where it's due and their chosen copyright license doesn't outright prohibit it, I'll post about it. I've seen the 'creative commons license' on a few sites and graphics, but no clarification of 'nonderivatives', so as long as I'm not making money, and since I'm such small fry, I'm probably gonna show them. Illustrations that aren't mine, though, won't be posted without artist permission, either stated on the art itself or as listed in their chosen copyright license.

i asked a professor about this, actually, and he said I was going about it the exact opposite of how I should- assume the most lax license until told to stop. fair enough! so if I'm told to take it down, obviously i will.

[manymanythoughts]

so I’m a bit more than halfway through my current journal, so I wanted to buy my next one ahead of time. I’ve really liked this journal, so I bought the same size and brand.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the dinosaurs in space, but I think this is a really good phrase to shove in my own face from time to time lol

[manymanythoughts]

Clashing patterns is gay culture

Hello, I’m (somewhat) back! May was one hell of a month, and for ~reasons~ my time looking at screens had to decrease dramatically, so I haven’t been able to upload or discuss much. That is getting better, slowly but surely, so hopefully I can get back to blogging about my journaling more!!

Anywho, my June spread is pride-themed, and here’s a pic of the very start of it- with the letters in June cut out of bisexual, LGBT, trans, and nonbinary pride color plaids.

[manymanythoughts]

idk if its just my trauma talking, but stuff like thankfulness/gratitude journaling put under the umbrella of ‘self-care’ is so fucking weird to me? like ‘ah yes i will follow this prompt that reminds me of how spoiled and ungrateful and terrible I am, this will make me feel better’. there’s maybe a bettering-myself purpose to be found there but I can’t imagine it as a feel-good coping thing

i keep seeing it as a bujo thing, with its own formats and guides and stuff, especially on self-care themed bujo pinboards, and I’m just so confused

[manymanythoughts]

Okay, so I wasn’t able to get it all done yesterday- took these pics quite late last night. I was having some issues drawing the lines on the mood tracker, and doing the math on the habit tracker, so I called it quits. The only finished things are the title page/dutch door and the involved pages. Definitely have a lot less on those pages (no tiny calendar, the mood tracker is elsewhere). Should be able to finish it up today!!

[manymanythoughts]

Very rudimentary plan for ‘April Showers’ spread

okay, so here’s the current plan for my April spread. Dutch door first, because I missed both the look of it, and the rudimentary bookmark it creates with a gap in the page. Dunno what font I’ll do the ‘April’ in, still looking that up.

I’m doing a few things to brighten up the spread- i’m giving a literal ‘silver lining’ to each cloud (for the ones I’m pasting in i can use a sharpie, but i did find a silver gel pen for the ones on the page itself). I’ll have a sun peeking out from the cloud on the page after the dutch door (which will show up behind the dutch door itself, as well). The habit tracker also gets a sun, plus an umbrella. Umbrellas are so much fun, I kept trying to think of other places to put it.

I had vague ideas for all of this except the mood tracker forming for a while, but the mood tracker had me kinda stumped. I found a great idea on this video from AmandaRachLee, with a cloud at the top and rain dangling down from it. I do need to figure out an all-blue mood ranking system, which might be challenging. Also, definitely don’t expect me to freehand clouds that pretty (or freehand at all, honestly) or that detailed.

I think, since this month is kinda buckwild schoolwork-wise, I may do a like... two page charting out of my month, instead of my usual tiny calendar in a corner. Not sure, though.

[manymanythoughts]

So I’m currently in a class that’s making me read lots of things in a variety of genres. Normally I wouldn’t read a romance just for the hell of it, but Red,White & Royal Blue was recommended to me ages ago. I bought it on a whim when I saw it in a Valentines display while I was shopping. Then came the week where I had to read a romance novel, and since I definitely didn’t want to read a cishet romance, that seemed like a good time to read it (and honestly, I’m pretty sure its the only romance I own).

I won’t write much more about it here (that’s what the spread is for) but I really enjoyed it, and I talked it up enough that my roommate wanted to borrow it. I bought him his own copy and he read it in one night.

I was planning to do a spread about it, so when I was in a craft store the other day buying a couple supplies for my partner, I bought a couple of sheets of scrapbook paper that fit the theme. The US flag washi tape probably won’t see much use outside of here and July 4th, but I couldn’t resist.

Only put one star on the blue section, since the main character (and, in its 3rd person limited, the POV character) is from Texas and the politics of the state and some of his ties back there play into the plot.

[manymanythoughts]

Okay, y'all should know that this took almost the entirety of March 1st. Didn't have a plan when I went to bed on February 28th, and FINALLY got one after being up for a few hours, still nursing my coffee because I have not been sleeping well at all lately. Found the tetris moodtracker and decided on a pixel style.

I decided to try and make the mood tracker part of the front page. Was even still planning to do a dutch door, but that didn't end up happening.

I got a tetris themed mood tracker here, cut off the top part with their font, resized it for my journal (which I recently discovered is a standard size, but not a common one) and printed it out. and pasted it in.

You can see the very top of it here, the 30 at the bottom. I used a pixelish font, with reference here. Didn't notice until the day I was working on this that there's a text generator at the bottom of the font page, which made everything a LOT easier. It took AGES to figure out a spacing that worked, and as you can see I ended up nesting most of the letters in the gaps of other ones. I based the colors on the colors of tetris blocks, though I never found a purple that really matched. I don't have a font for the '2021', just thought about how it looks on a calculator and drew that.

Same font was used for this, but I found another wonderful resource: a free graph paper generator, with SO MANY options. It's all considered public domain- the creator states it at the top of every selection. Also, the pixel font's license is free for both personal and commercial use. Thank fuck for creators who specify their usage terms. Anywho, made the habit tracker with that instead of drawing it myself, it saved so much time and effort.

This time, instead of using my habit tracker to track whether I'm meeting my get up/get to bed goals, I gave it it's own page where I can write in the exact times- and I'll just fill it in if it hits my goal. Again, used the pixel font and the graph paper generator- for both the cutouts of the letters (which had to be smaller than the title bc with the sleep tracker there wasn't a five-by-five space on this grid), and the sleep tracker itself.

I really want to draw something on the left blank space, but I don't have any ideas. I think a cute thing could be a pixely sheep and clouds because y'know, sleep. i may get to that eventually, whenever I'm done reading like a madman.

By this page I was running out of ideas, so I spaced out what I wanted on this last page and figured out what I wanted on this page. I basically free-handed the font here, which I'm proud of- still using the font for reference, but making it fit a 3 by 3 space instead. There was enough space for the heart (which I'd previously done on the undertale spread at the front of this journal), and by that point it was 11 PM, so. there's that.

I'm not all that proud of this spread in general, but considering I did a lot less research and planning for this one than the January and February spreads, it came out okay. Definitely taking advantage of the free graph paper from now on, it's so helpful.

[manymanythoughts]

Unfortunately, I can’t show my mood tracker this month because I ended up using one from a shop. They didn’t specify their copyright type, just said ‘for personal use only’, no exact CC license or anything. As an information professional, I gotta assume the most strict license, and I’ve got no idea what is ‘fair use’ for this context. Everything else I’ll show! The custom graphing paper I’ve been using for other stuff is an OA resource with a CC license allowing not-for-profit derivatives.

[manymanythoughts]

Had no idea what I was gonna do for a March spread, and then I saw a tetris-themed mood tracker... pixel art and vintage video game aesthetic it is!

[manymanythoughts]

hello! you might have noticed I haven’t been posting recently- that’s because I haven’t been journaling recently. I’ve (mostly) kept up with my habit tracker, occasionally fallen behind on my mood tracker, but haven’t written an entry in over a week.

I definitely had some times in my first journal where I stopped journaling- not sure how that will translate into my journaling now, in which I’m trying to interact with it daily, however minimally.

Anywho, I’m gonna at least include space for a March spread, though it may not actually be made tonight.

[manymanythoughts]

Taken in altogether, I think this is pretty cool. I’m honestly proud of this one! I tried a lot of new things, some successful and some less so, so it was a good learning experience.

The Hunger in the bottom left is made up of a piece of cardstock drawn black (apparently the block of construction paper I bought doesn’t have any black). I used cut out construction paper for the eyes and drew the pupil with black pen- if I had more skill and dexterity, as well as incredibly small scissors, I think it’d look even cooler if the pupils were just the base paper showing through a hole- but alas, that’s not gonna happen. The veins of color are various gel pens. The cheap set contained a lot less opaque inks than expected- which is why most of them are either my nicer white and blue gelly rolls or the sparkly ones in the cheaper set.

As I think I already mentioned, the Voidfish is made of fabric from some masks I bought that turned out to be kinda shitty, and are thus co-opted as craft materials. I made the bell, then set the frill bit on top of it with folds of it overlapping each other in a few places. The tentacles were... an experience. I think I should have sketched out most of it so I had a better idea of the length I wanted, where I wanted them to overlap, etc. instead of mostly free-handing it. Also should’ve waited to put the frill part on after the tentacles which just would’ve made more sense. No idea why that didn’t occur to me. Anywho, the Voidfish is a beloved character for me, so I was happy to make a nice fancy version of them (after almost two years of doodling him on receipt and coupon paper when it was slow when I worked retail).

[manymanythoughts]

Just realized I never posted this picture! A big part of late 2020/early 2021 for me was horror media of various types- LPs of horror games, summaries and reviews of horror movies like FoundFlix and Dead Meat, and even a couple horror films I managed to watch.

This spread happened because I felt like writing about my weird relationship with horror. I’m a scaredy cat and have clinical anxiety, so I rarely watch horror movies, and I need jump scare time stamps when I watch horror game LPs. However, I like the macabre, gore kinda fascinates me, and I generally enjoy hearing about inventive plots and interesting deaths. Youtubers who talk about horror have been a really nice door into that genre that lets me approach it in a less anxiety-inducing way.

I’m honestly pretty pleased with this spread- the dripping blood in the upper left corner was fun, and Jack Torrence looking like he’s torn through the page turned out better than expected.

[manymanythoughts]

I am.... less happy with the voidfish, but I did a lot less prep for it then I maybe should have. The tentacles are a bit wonkily spaced, but not too bad. I do love how the galaxy fabric looks though!