arlita's blog

my oldest kid has a following on a roblox game called my movie that they play bcos they are/want to continue learning to be an animator. every now and again they will get asked to make a rig for someone else, which involves them piecing together emojis and clipart to make a head, body, arm, leg, puppy ears/tail lol etc., then screenshotting it all. then they carefully delete the backgrounds and arrange it in ibispaint, and reupload it all to roblox as an asset or something, the process is wildly complex to me but they fly through the menus doing all this so i guess it's not so bad lol. they then share the id for the rig to the requester, and later we get to see how the rig gets used and animated which is fun.

yesterday, they came up to me with their ipad and showed me their screen, and told me "someone asked me to make them a rant layout, here's what i made." im still stuck on this if i'm honest even tho i've gotten clarification from my kid that it is a background for rant animations and commentary. rant layout. i am not at all by the way casting any judgement on the creative projects kids assign themselves and the culture that may surround whateva kids are up to at the moment lol. youth culture will always be bonkers, and that is a relief. rant layout. have you ever heard of a rant layout. i imagine someone has but yesterday was my first time hearing about a rant layout. i asked, "can it be a vent layout? for venting? or only ranting?" they respond "rant layout." the rant layout did look really good, it is black and red with textures and borders added around, and has the person's illustrated persona decorating the side. how they make these things with whatever pngs and jpgs happen to be accessible in roblox my movie i have NO clue.

my littlest's creative outlet is a sandbox game called melon sandbox. he likes to fill my phone up with hour long screen recordings of him playing melon sandbox. he used to call it sandbox melon :') he has somehow added over 250 mods to his game so it takes a hot minute to even get into the app loading them all. these days he's been making planets that have 'woken up'. there's an animated series called the moon woke up that most mothers would not let their six year olds even glance at. anyways in it, the planets have faces with gaping features. he uses rectangles and somehow fixes them together, and adds details like the face and craters with smaller rectangles. i really enjoy watching both of my kids find new ways to render their ideas, like some day he will figure out how to make the planets and moons and suns circular, then spherical, and suddenly his abstract flatlanders will go to having as much life and presence as he finds in the original inspiration.

his favorite song right now is related to a character called verity, which is another piece of media i have a hard time explaining to people who think kids should walk around blinded with hands over their eyes. in our world it's a very popular character right now but in my family's world it it just noise that contrasts thomas the tank engine. anyways, he's been singing a song called my gal. it's jazz and swingy which is fine but it's very upbeat like too upbeat for me lol. but it is soooooooooo cute when he sings it of course, and now my oldest has learned the words and tunes in with him. when i was younger my little brother spent a loot of time at home singing the songs he was learning in chorus, not deliberately practicing just singing, so i would learn them and sing them with him too.

i just think my kids are so cool and that is the topic of my blog today ttyl :)

i feel like im on the other side of a blip. am i on the other side of a blip lol?? i refuse to acknowledge time on principle and that has never really wronged me, in fact i think basically never having reminded someone it's hump day is goated if i may brag. but today i thought it was thursday. the other tuesday i thought it was monday then on wednesday i thought it was thursday. i have no idea how to claw my way back to umm wherever i was before i fell thru the cracks. when i feel around for what the past, like, 9 months have felt like, it's a large concave frosted glass window, smooth and obscured. extremely obscured. so if i did want to talk about it and about like... me, i can't. i am losing specificity or maybe im loosening my grip on it. people are fallible and words aren't entiirely concrete. weirdly and somehow that applies to me too. i am annoyed knowledge doesn't feel collaborative even between two people. i think the doubt is exhausting. i can insist on myself with open ears, mostly haha.

when i worked retail i noticed i hummed to myself when a customer was being overly mean. then i noticed i sing outloud to myself when i'm uncomfortable after my mom mentions my body. to a living room packed with family members. i know mom that i am late to the party and that i am withering away. then i noticed very recently there is always a song playing in my head, my whole life there always has been, interruptive but enthusiastic. never noticed never complained. lately i can't turn this radio down. actually never bothered to try. i have been asking everyone if there is always music playing in their head, and everyone has said "not always", except for my brother who said "right now it's the samsung washing machine". so i asked "is there ever silence on your mind radio?" and he said "moments of silence, yes."

omg i should probably mention im putting the blog on its own page :) i want there to be more on the index lol so moving the blog doesn't help loll but it feels more at place in its own page.

i am considering putting some of the old pages up again, or adapting them/reworking them. i put the old pages away is a more fitting idiom than i took the old pages down. in lotsa ways it would be a monumental task, and this consideration takes a low priority over new ideas. i don't want to fill the gaps that popped in after having gone from many pages to 1 index 1 blog and currently 3 aux pages. i also don't want to replace anything in a sense, i just want to have ideas and produce them lol :)

i'm so glad the web building world has a word for 'i can't right now' and it's called hiatus. i knew at some point i wouldn't update my site as enthusiastically as i did when i first made it lol but to put it shortly life was very uncertain there for minute!! idk if im going to talk about it yet :p as for the social side of neocities im going to have my profile disabled for a while and i might add a chatbox or guestbook on here, not sure ^_^ just trying not to overwhelm myself and burn out so soon lol.

okay so!! im thinking about making this webpage one really long page. i looooved having a lot of links at the top of my page for people to explore it felt like having a small softened notebook where every page has a little something on it that i didn't mind people flipping through. for real!!!!!!!! but the idea of having one really long page and possible secret pages is really exciting!! here's the thing, i've been hiding out on nekoweb for the past couple of months, my subdoman is boyblythe if you want to check it out O: i've been spending a lot of time with html and css!!

the way i had my website before, it was tedious to update anything. i didn't mind lol i loved it. but after not having done it at all for a while and opening that spaghetti back up, especially after spending a lot of time recently with css, was simply not going to happen lmaoo i didn't even open them up before taking them down. vibes based coding until something works is great but wowEE learning what it all it can do and getting ideas based on that is wildly fun. which is whyy i want to keep this one long page, something easy to update stylistically, and most importantly follow-the-rules arlita and the break-the-rules arlita are at peace when i consider this idea. AND it is automatically mobile friendly which is awesomes. but i might have to change this font for readability but i might not because i do really like it.

i googled the word hiatus out of curiosity, and found out that in linguistics a hiatus is when two different vowel sounds are next to each other in a word and pronouncing them causes a pause, as in the word hiatus, between the i sound and the a sound !! the word hiatus has a hiatus y'all. ok see ya soon!!