Hi Everyone! I'm Doing Better After The Other Day, Thanks For The Well-wishes. Things Are Leveling Out

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'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!

Get The Bananas, Rivers 🍌

new stream archive! in which i return to monke... i mean streaming. yeah, i think i'm finally back!

Rivers finds a little friend 🦋

if you missed last night's stream, these innovative watercolor paintings are in fact still frames of the video quality from the new stream setup. it wasn't always this bad, but it was often enough to be really distracting. (luckily, most of us were playing, not watching~)

this quality reminds me of back when i used to stream from my laptop, and that probably means it's being encoded on my laptop after all (while streaming); the whole point of the new setup was to offload the encoding to the capture card itself, so this is pretty disappointing.

i need to look into alternatives to make this setup work, but it might not be feasible outside of getting a new computer.

in the meantime i've still got my old desktop, so i can stream as long as i don't mind filling the room with hot air (and i don't just mean my commentary...)