Blog 5: Reflection
2/21/26
This blog isn't really going to be too exciting or anything too interesting, but just a reflection I've had this past week.
The start of this week wasn't great. I got sick on Monday, forcing me to skip my classes for the day in order to rest. After Monday, I could still go to classes, but I had still had the after effects of it and continued having to deal with it.
Now, it's not as if I'd feel too bad about a sickness for the entire week, but it revealed something that I was trying to avoid.
It was about how lazy I was.
I had a week to do so much, meet so many new people, do some interesting things with free time, take a small walk once in a while.
But I was so tired that I didn't want to do any of those things and instead, It's been a week and now I can't even write anything new.
Getting sick doesn't drain you physically, it sometimes drains you mentally. Rather than finding time to do anything product or interesting, you feel it's so worthless to even try such actions and go to sleep instead, being lethargic. Now obviously I'm not trying to say that these actions/thoughts come up only because you get sick, but I feel these thoughts are exacerbated due to it.
However, I do not want to blame my inaction this week due to my sickness. I've been feeling for a long time that I could be doing so much more with the time I have per day compared to what I have. I think that I could achieve and create so much more, rather than coming up with excuses, speaking about how I have no time to do certain hobbies.
I know I've been neglecting a lot of things due to this. This website is one of them. I promised I'd have up more pages about games and anime I've played/watched, but I haven't even completed a small portion of it. I start to question how much I care about this small site and makes me revaluate whether the choice was right for making my own site.
But enough being negative.
Only speaking about the problems you have will not fix anything. Finding solutions are the only way to get over this slump. So what could I do to not have these thoughts and maximise my time?
Theres a lot too do, but I like to take it one at a time. To me, I think the most detrimental time loss is the way I start my day. I wake up around 9-10 am and stay in my room until the afternoon to get lunch.
At that point, I'm so tired that getting out the room is such a pain and takes a lot of effort for me to do. If I start my day with a different mindset, I could totally see myself feeling refreshed and using the most of my day.
To do this, I think I should start waking up earlier. I've always been an early morning person ever since elementary school, getting up at 7 am on the weekdays before everyone else. I think its time to return to that mindset, and not only get up, but try to do morning excercise. It doesn't need to be entering the gym each morning, but a light jog around campus could be a great way to start the day. I think I'll be able to get refreshed and feel a lot more attentive for my classes and work.
Now, to end of this blog with not a heavy end, I did manage to finish reading a book this week.
I finished reading Animal Farm by George Orwell. It's a short book and a good book to Analyze while reading. The heavy themes about oppresion and authoritarianism and it's effect on a society is thought tickling. If you have some time, get the book from you local library and read it. It's not very long and could take you less than a day to read the entire book.
Sorry for not having a better description, I'm just not good at book reviews.
-MistiqueDrako
Blog 4: New artstyle
2/14/26
Ok, so I really don't know where to start, but I've been trying a new artsytle recently.
I've started to draw PC98 style graphic art.
Now first of all, what is that?
The NEC PC-9800 series was launched in Japan in the 1980s and was the defacto operating system for the country until the growth of Windows OS worldwide. They were used everywhere in Japan, so they are sold cheap despite being antiquated technology. However, the ones that are sold online aren't always in pristine condition and may have some faults. Nonetheless, the device brought many games to the system, many which we would never get in the west due to their obscurity and difference in operating systems, with the PC-98 series not being an IBM based technology while other computers were.
Anyways I went a bit off topic. The OS gave birth to the PC-98 artstyle, used in many games, especially well known for visual novels and rpg's. Although the system could only display 16 colors (with only 4096 options from the color pallet) at once, it was able to deliver detailed art due to the tools provided. Although it lacked color when compared to other systems such as sega genesis and snes for the time, it had a base display resolution of 640px x 400px (could be greater depending on addons or certain systems such as PC-98XA or PC-H98), which surpased a lot of consoles at the time, allowing for detailed art to be expressed.
I first was exposed to the artsytle when I bought and played True Love '95. A short and fun dating simulator that was cheap on JAST and fun to play for a couple of hours. The artstyle was beautiful and I wanted to draw in that artstyle, therefore I tried searching for ways I could mimic or draw in the style.
Unfortunately, the style isn't popular online, probably since it never got traction in the west due to not needing such detailed art, but I was able to find the software most applications and games used to create their art, Multi-paint system.
It took a while to understand how to set it up, but after booting up neko project 2, gathering the software required, and inserting the virtual disk into the emulator, I was finally able to play around with the software.
I'd talk a lot more, but I don't think I have the time currently. Maybe for another day, but this isn't the day. I might one day make a tutorial so other can use it without having to go through the headache I had.
After using for a month, these are some of the art pieces I created:
If you hover over the image with the bench, you'll see that the background is blured. I tried to see if having the background blured would look better, but I couldn't decide, so I created both.
A big issue that I came across was color selection. I didn't plan my color pallette before coloring, so stuff that would benefit from 1-2 extra colors, such as the trees and grass were given to the water, which really didn't need it.
All the peices I drew were first drawn on paper, then scanner and uploaded to my computer to then clean up and color. You don't need your own, most moderately sized libraries will have one you can probably use free of charge, so you can do this as well.
I'll probably talk more about this in a seperate post, but I've also added the PC-98 artstyle in the art page, so you can see what new art I've uploaded.
Check it out when you have time.
See you next week
-MistiqueDrako
Blog 3: Workload
2/7/26
I'd was originally planning to write something else this week, but I'm currerntly busy at the moment, so this short blog will be all for this week.
Sorry about that.
You see, I got exams this week, and I dont think I'm prepared for them. Some of them, like Physics and CS, I just need a bit of studying and I'll be good. But for others, like Linear Algebra, I'm going to need to lock in.
Linear Algebra isn't hard because there are hard problems, far from it. Problems are easy and they dont take a lot of effort to solve if you know what your doing. This isn't calculus with weird ass equations or problems with only numbers, its a lot simplier
Notice that I said they're easy if you know what your doing.
Linear Algebra is more conceptual knowledge rather than practical understanding. If you know the rules and how to play with matricies, you'll be able to handle anything that comes your way.
Now a thing that I struggle with is that. I've done Calculus problems from the last 4-5 years, so it's real hard to adjust going back to basic algebra with matrices in play. I don't have to deal with the 3rd, 4th, or whatever dimension, I need to only deal with 2.
So thats why I've been struggling in understanding whats going on in class. Actually I don't pay that much attention in class. My teacher isn't the greatest, since he speeds through the content and isn't very vocal nor interesting when teaching. I'm only able to understand the concept once we do examples and while doing the homework.
I know Linear Algebra is usually hard, but I never expected to be this lost when learning it.
Thankfully, I've picked up some knowledge about it. I'm able to do matrix calculations, such as addition and multiplication. I can find the determinants and transposes easily. Row Echelon is pretty easy once you do em and inverse matrices are fun, basic math problems once you understand how they work.
Stuff I don't know are stuff such as what a subset is? How do you determine that?
There are weird rules in this subject, but at least I can pick up on them quickly once I get a hang of it.
So yeah, thats why I haven't really updated this page. This isn't the only reason, there are many reasons for me being busy this week. However, I'll try to start updating this page after my exams are done.
Fun fact, 2 of my exams are on the same day and fortunately not at the same time. Part of me wishes for them to be all on the same day, but I'm glad I dont need to stress out too much.
Anyways, I dont think I'll have time to update this webpage before the next blog, but I'll show something cool I've been working on over the week.
See you next week.
Update: So I was going to upload my updated blog to the webpage, but unfortunately right when I was about to upload, I lost power. Funny how things play out sometimes
-MistiqueDrako
Blog 2: Website Background
1/31/26
Ok, so I wanted to say a lot more in this post, but I woke up late today and I don't have a lot of time to write about stuff.
Maybe I shouldn't have wrote yesterday and waited till today to post my first blog.
Regardless, I'm writing today because I want to talk about what's with the website's background currently, what it looks like, and why it looks weird on this site.
At the time of writing this blog, my website background is this .gif file
This gif was to represent a comet flying over an alien sky, particularly one with a vibrant purple sky and rocky terrain. I was inspired by an art piece I drew in school at the time and liked the background setting.
This was at the time I was starting to get into pixel art, so I didn't understand how shading worked all that much along with what colors would be the best to represent it.
However, I stopped working on this art piece for some reason. From what I remember, I just didn't like how it came out and felt burned out with the amount of time it took do draw this piece.
Especially because I drew each frame of the animation frame-by-frame.
I'm suprised I did that, I must have had so much time back then.
Still, I need to answer the question, why did this become my art background? Well it's because I was looking through the files of my computer, seeing what art pieces I could upload to my website. I wanted to see what I've created and share it to others, no matter what the quality of the piece was to me. I stumbled onto it by chance and decided it would be nice to repurpose it to be my background for this website, for the time being.
Now, the issue with this is that the piece was not designed for the website, so the aspect ratio did not fit the website when viewed on PC. I was able to have it stretch to fill the whole screen, so thats why the background looks very weird on this page. The image was not meant to fit a page thats very long.
I'm planning on designing a new image for this website, and another one for the blogs so that it doesn't look too weird or streched out. But thats for another time, and I'm very hungry at the moment. I gotta go eat now
I will see you all next week, where I'll write about something.
-MistiqueDrako
Blog 1: My first blog!
1/30/26
Yay my first blog on this website! I have so much I want to say, but I'd like to keep it short for the first blog.
This week saw my area get hit with the strong winter storm, and the temperature got low enough to snow.
This is unusal where I live; Southeast texas, where temperatures at worst, get to the low of 40-50F at night. Never does the weather showing the outside temperature to be below 32F, or even below 20F is considred normal here.
Now this seems to be a very memorable experience for me to have; however, this causes issues in my state.
You see, our powergrid is not built for this type of weather/climate. We never expect it to snow down near the gulf. Therefore, our powerlines are usually exposed due to not having the need to hide them due to the lack of fear of a snow storm approaching.
Snow has come to SE Texas before, but it usually comes in a small amount, meaning it's relatively harmless and the powerlines are safe. However when a snow storm comes, many powerlines fail and the grid is unable to operate, meaning a lot of people lose power to essential needs, such as food, heat, and water.
Well, you may say, why is it such a big deal if the Texas grid fails, you can always try and ask for another state's grid to help out. This is a valid option and is what other states can do if they have issue with power generation in their state, except....
For SOME REASON, most of Texas is on it's own powergrid! I mean I guess it is a lead in energy production and can be flexible on how it deals with energy transmission, but still. Not even big states like California or New York have their own grid, being connected to the Western and Eastern grid specifically. This means when the grid fails in Texas, it's really costly, time consuming, and hard to import power from other grids across the states.
This was shown back in 2021 (Wow over 5 years ago) where we had a winter storm and the state was not prepared for it. I remember having to wait a week at my cousin's apartment due with another family due to our water and electricity not coming back, and the apartment being the only place to have electricity.
Thats why when news of the storm came to Texas, so many people were emptying supplies from the supermarkets, taking water bottles(except Dasani lmao), food, and supplies. Because no one wanted a repeat of last time and no one knew how bad it would be.
As for me, well I really didn't think too much of it. I know weird, despite living through it, I never really prepared for the storm because I knew(or had a feeling) I wouldn't loose power due to my location. I am in college at the point of writing this blog, and I know my campus would probably be fine due to it being built to survive any weather condition lol(It was fine in the 2021 winter storm).
I also wasn't bothered to buy supplies or prep up.
The storm wasn't too bad for me, and i just stayed inside and finished my playthough of HL2 Ep1 and Ep2. My classes were Cancelled on Monday, and that was the day I decided to start work on this website.
So in a weird way, the storm pushed me to create this website.
Wow I rambled a lot here. I didn't expect to write this much, and I wanted to talk about some other things, but I think it's best to leave it off here for now.
I'm currently writing this in my Linear Algebra class, so I should probably pay attention.
I'm still planning to release another blog on Saturday.