Mari Musings

December 2025

• Diary: Not-Picmix…

  Hi, how are you? The holidays are coming up so fast, but I’m barely past Halloween emotionally. And before I know it, it will be 2026. Will I be past Thanksgiving by then? (⌒_⌒;) Today, I learned that I can decorate my iPhone photos with my iMessage stickers natively in the Photos app. It lacks the functionality of a more robust editing app, but it does the job. It’s been fun to play with Picmix-style edits. Here is a photo diary of sorts! My coworker gave me this adorable sucker. It was heart-shaped and so sweet. ( ´ ∀ `)ノ～♡ My phone is basically a ticking time bomb at this point. It’s an iPhone XR, and it’s hard to believe it’s already 7 years old. I can’t use many apps due to performance issues, so I rely on the browser. Unfortunately, most sites are so bloated that my phone crashes after a few minutes. On the bright side, this keeps me off my phone lol. Today, I bought fabric for a sewing project. My mom asked me to sew her a pair of ‘quilted pants with side blankets.’ Basically…

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November 2025

• Improving a…

  Last January, I started working on a painting of Clover using shojo illustrations as my inspiration. I studied and referenced several CLAMP paintings while working on it. After about a month of working on and off, I decided it was finished. I'm not sure what my thought process was in deciding I was done with it. I had finished the line work, the second pass of rendering, the background... Perhaps I was sick of looking at it and wanted to move onto something else. Either way, this is what it looked like in February when it was 'done.' It's pretty, and I like it. But even at the time, I knew it could be better. I knew that I my painting skill could go beyond the 'finished' state, but I stopped pushing myself. I'm not sure why. Several months, a couple paintings, and hundreds of sketches later, I started thinking about the techniques of the Renaissance master painters. I don't remember what lead to this train of thought, but it was a key point of discovery in my journey as an artist. The…

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• Revisiting…

  Hello, everyone! I'm FINALLY blogging again... so crazy. I've wanted to change my blogging system for some time now, and I've experimented with a few different things. Previously I used Zonelets for blogging, which is great for beginner web developers, especially those who don't have access to server side languages and databases like PHP and MySQL. However, I found Zonelets to be tedious to update alongside my RSS feed which was also manual at the time. While never going live, I ported all of my posts to a fork of Zonelets called Zonelots which has a few more features than Zonelets. However, I ran into the same issue – it's so damn tedious to update a static site blog like that. Of course, that isn't the only barrier I've had to blogging, but my hope is that my shiny new bloggin CMS will encourage me to use it more. I looked at forks of WordPress such as ClassicPress, but I ultimately decided that it's a little more involved than I'd like. This is just a simple blog, and I want to be…

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• Mari Musings

  Ham-ha! Welcome to my little blog where I write about my interests and what inspires me. ♥

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July 2025

• Manifesting Doom Guy

  As a webmistress that dedicates so much of my site to gaming, it's only apt that I use Doom as a metaphor for how my life is falling apart at the seams. Which is, of course, dramatic, but I've been gone for a long time fighting demons — guts, and all. That's about as theatrical as it gets. The voyeurs of my life want blood, dammit! This last year I've grown up a lot, but I'm tired. I've been struggling a lot for a long time now, and it feels like every time I overcome one obstacle, there's a bigger, meaner one lurking just around the corner. How many demons can one Doom Guy fight before being swallowed up whole?! I seriously feel like the next thing that goes wrong in my life will eat me for dinner. I am in a mammoth size suffering to coping cycle. I'm doing my best to be skillful and mature. I try to find peace in small moments like singing while I cook dinner or feeling the evening sun on my skin. I take the time to be grateful for what's going well in my life — I have my own place…

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