Here Is A Vine I Wanted To Make Way Back When Vine Was Still Relevant, But I Couldn't Quite Edit It Down

Here is a Vine I wanted to make way back when Vine was still relevant, but I couldn't quite edit it down to 6.5 seconds. Enjoy

hi everyone! i'm doing better after the other day, thanks for the well-wishes. things are leveling out a bit, but life is still kind of a roller coaster lately – with my highs at their highest in recent memory, and my lows at their lowest.

that would be exhausting by itself, but what really concerns me is that the intensity has been increasing over the past three months or so – the highs keep going higher, and the lows keep going lower… if it gets too much more than this, i'm scared i might lose my lunch!

for now i'm gonna keep riding this out and hope it slows down soon, but in the meantime my availability may be spotty, and i probably won't have a whole lot of time or energy to make stuff like i want to. that's okay, though – life is more important right now.

i've spent a ton of my creative energy lately investing into myself (links page etc) and that's cool and all but i really miss making stuff that makes others happy too

one thing i need to remind myself is that not everything needs to be a big production, like a stream or a mappack – sometimes just a single level or blog post will do the trick. and while they may not seem as grand or important, people still find enjoyment and insight in them!

like, those three months from dec 2019 to feb 2020 where i was pumping out blog posts and mario maker levels? that was kickass! i wanna go back to that level of productivity... but not the extrinsic stressors that led to it.

not to say that the pandemic killed my momentum, but i can definitely see the throughline that led me to focus more of my creative energy on myself. in fairness, i needed that (and still do!). in practice, i like getting more engaging feedback than "oh that's neat"

i still get nice comments on my old streams, levels, blogposts – i want to both share the love and remind myself of what i'm capable of. my recent projects have really only benefited me, but if i put in the work then i want everyone to benefit!

in some ways i feel like this desire conflicts with my new years resolution of "Oh God I Am In Desperate Need Of Rest And Healing" but restoring my creative energy *is* healing. and as long as i remind myself that not everything needs to be a Project, it should still be restful.

Mechakoopa Moat | P06-KTV-02G

Bolt across the drawbridge to Bowser's castle while evading a flying wall of deadly Mechakoopa lasers! This short but intense course is best suited for players who like to learn from dying... a lot.

I'm Sky now!

Hi everyone! In light of coming out as genderfluid, I have a big announcement: I'm changing my name! You may remember me as WillWare, but from now on, I go by Sky ✨

*crickets*

What, is that not news? Okay, so maybe I've been putting off writing this post for a bit... *sigh* like a few months. But, as always, I wanted to do more than just say that I have a new name. In this post, I'd like to talk about why I changed my name, and what the future of my identity looks like.

Of course, changing my name is not a decision I made lightly. To be totally honest, I didn't want to give up WillWare at all! It's a great name, I've built up quite an identity around it, and changing my username literally everywhere on the web is a daunting process. Why go to all that trouble when I already like what I have?

The reason for this is twofold, and the first... is that "Will" makes me feel boxed in to being a guy. It's a traditionally male name, and as a genderfluid person, I want the freedom to feel like a guy or like a girl. Even back when all I knew is that I was nonbinary, I still had this issue; I tried going by any pronouns even back then, but I was only ever referred to as "he," and didn't even feel comfortable referring to myself as anything else!

When I came out as genderfluid, I remembered a name I had been kicking around since college: "Sky." It felt right, but I still wasn't sure – so I tried changing my name in a private Discord server, and that's when it clicked: This is my name. This is who I've always wanted to be. As much as I still love my old name, it's time to become something new.

For the record, I'm not getting rid of my old name; you can continue to call me Will or Sky and it's totally cool. In fact, I'm keeping Will as my middle name! But Sky is more accurate to who I am, and it's the name I will use for myself going forward.

The other reason I'm changing my name isn't as much about gender, but rather, identity... "WillWare" made me feel boxed into being a brand. This is at least partly my own fault for trying to build myself into a brand in the first place; even so, something definitely felt impersonal about it. This was fine back when I didn't quite know what my gender was yet (and I even leaned into it on some occasions), but I often felt like I was only a presence on the internet, rather than a person.

"Sky," meanwhile, is just my name – it's just me! And in a crucial time of my transition, where it's helping me feel more like a person than ever before (even IRL!), calling myself by just my name helps make it more concrete, more real.

Of course, I'm still a graphic designer at heart, and I love making fancy branding – that's not going anywhere. So my look is transitioning, too, to align with my new name! It's been slow going, but here's a sneak peek:

I'm not yet sure what else I want to do with it, but I do know that I even want to make this more personal than before, too. As such, this leans into the genderfluid color scheme, and makes the letter motif more obvious than with my old W. I'm excited to experiment with this and see where it takes me!

Until my new look is done, I've been using pictures of my OC Rivers for my social media (who I also want to talk about here soon!) – and, honestly, having a face instead of a hexagon has made me feel even more like a real person on the web. Maybe I'll even stick with that for a while... So as a parting gift, let me illustrate this with what may be my best tweet of all time – one that perfectly summarizes my feelings on my gender at present:

Thanks as always for reading!

mastodon being decentralized twitter and letting anyone host an instance is a great idea in theory, until instance owners start playing social politics with each other and blocking other instances wholesale, cutting users off from their friends unless they move

there's no real way to know which instances are "safe" unless you follow the discourse, which is exhausting and ever-changing

so users either get constantly displaced, or cut off from the rest of the fediverse

not even the main instance run by the creator of mastodon himself is safe, because it got too big for its britches or some other nonsense

(sorry i don't follow the drama enough to know the real reason, i have better things to do with my time)

you could argue this is due to a lack of useful moderation tools, but that argument only goes so far; there was a massive instance block campaign over an instance harboring one single user, not even a moderator – and there are definitely tools to block individual users

in summary, i don't think anyone expected mastodon would somehow make twitter-style social politics WORSE, but it sure succeeded