Looking Back on November

Dec 3, 2023 | About 2 min reading time

Content warning: towards the end of the post I discuss a family member being in the ICU and medical professionals being, to put it lightly, a pain in the ass. If you're not in the proper headspace to hear about that, you'll want to stop reading after the paragraph about Twitch and YouTube.

November was... a very eventful month, to say the least.

In positive news, I got my first ever art commission for real money, which I'm still super proud of. I feel like I've come a long way since I started taking art seriously, especially in shading and rendering which is the main aspect I'm trying to improve currently. I do still struggle a bit with anatomy, though, so I'll have to force myself to work on some more fullbodies and practice that more.

Another project of mine, the Art Hive studio, now has open submissions for the December exhibition. I likely won't include my own art in this exhibition, as doing that twice in a row would feel a little odd. However, if you were featured in the October exhibition, I encourage you to submit your art again if you'd like to do so! Any sort of visual art can be featured, including photography, pictures of physical crafts you've made, digital art, etc.

I also got back to streaming this month, though I quickly got knocked back off track by events in my life. I also made a new YouTube video on the recent updates for Minecraft, and if you don't want to watch that on YouTube because of the whole situation with ads, you can also watch it and all my other videos on my PeerTube channel, which is synced automatically with my YouTube channel. PeerTube is part of the Fediverse (think Mastodon, PixelFed, etc.), so it's decentralized and there are no ads. The server I'm on is currently struggling to keep up with expenses, though - video hosting is not cheap. If you'd like to help support them, it looks like they're in need of about $60 a month currently, and their Open Collective page has more information on how to help!

In more negative news, one of my siblings was in the ICU for a few days recently. They are fine now, but I'm still incredibly angry at the medical professionals involved for how they handled the situation. We didn't get anything adequately explained to us until over 24 hours after my sibling was initially admitted to the hospital, a person with a sprained ankle was given priority over my sibling (who had signs of internal bleeding and would have likely died if we hadn't taken them to the emergency room upon noticing these signs) by the triage nurse, and our family doctor, despite telling us my sibling was at risk for developing the condition that caused this, failed to follow up on the issue or investigate any of the symptoms we were telling him about that were related to this condition. My sibling is semi-verbal and wouldn't have been able to communicate any symptoms that weren't outwardly visible, too.

Luckily, it's a condition that can be kept under control and it now is being managed. I'm trying to focus more on that than my anger.

Some more positive news to end this blog post with: I joined Pixel Cat's End towards the end of October! It's been really fun so far, and I enjoy adventuring a lot in particular. Here's my profile, feel free to add me as a friend if you'd like!