Julaugust.
August 2, 2026
It’s July in August. August in July? Eh. Monthly update post.
site updates
ordered alphabetically by site URL
- a-flyleaf.github.io (you are here): Overhauled the colophon. There’s a bunch of stuff there that I haven’t used for ages, and now there is an honorable mention section for it.
- /dragonotes
- Made a psuedo-wiki page for a long-lingering lore idea. Actual text is incomplete as of writing, but it gets the concept and page layout down.
- The About page is still a kind of unwieldly behemoth, but it has an automatic dark theme now! As do random other semi-standalone pages. FR has a dark theme now (finally…!), good incentive to follow suit—and make it a standard for all my pages, going forward.
- Special show-off for the finished dragon gallery, which has mostly not changed but looks a heck of a lot better with some formatting and color polish. It also no longer has placeholder text about what the page ~could’ve been~ or ~was supposed to be~, instead just presenting what it is: a big wall of dragons.
- /shriblets
- Cobbled together a pseudo-visual-novel proof-of-concept thign, building on some one-off tests with sprites and page-jumping. I’ve never been super keen on how the standard VN layout has you staring awkwardly at the character’s legs (or wherever the sprite crops off), so I shifted around the text placement here. It does not account for narration or other forward-compatible workings, and the spriteload is Not Ideal, but as a one-off test I think it works pretty well! It’s even mobile-friendly ;V
Was also a good excuse to throw some stock photos in a blender, something I haven’t done since… 2023-ish? It’s fun. It is entirely vibes-based. It is a good substitute for drawing backgrounds, which I do not tend to enjoy doing and am not particularly compelled to improve at.
- Cobbled together a pseudo-visual-novel proof-of-concept thign, building on some one-off tests with sprites and page-jumping. I’ve never been super keen on how the standard VN layout has you staring awkwardly at the character’s legs (or wherever the sprite crops off), so I shifted around the text placement here. It does not account for narration or other forward-compatible workings, and the spriteload is Not Ideal, but as a one-off test I think it works pretty well! It’s even mobile-friendly ;V
- /toyshelf
- There are now not one but two not-default-layout character pages. Those links will probably break/redirect someday. I kind of desperately need to overhaul the entire backend sorting of everything yesterday, but that is a project for another day.
- Added a 2025 redraw scribble, and then a bunch of 2018 art from the same canon. I don’t do much with these characters these days, but their designs continue to linger and be good for random sketches.
“Random (semi-)standalone pages” seems to have been the code theme of the month, inasmuch as I can retroactively shoehorn a code theme into existence. It’s probably worth noting that I moved the colophon bullet for Proper Sleek Clean Modernist Design, exemplified by the theme you’re looking at, into “yeah I don’t use this much anymore lol.”
media musings
corner to OFF*
- As mentioned at the end of last post, I bought the OFF remaster. I’m enjoying it! If I had a nickel for every Affecting boss fight with a churchly aura in an indie RPG I’d have two nickels, and I did not think I would get jumpscared by a door-wall. Nice.
When I played the original game in… jesus 2015 apparently, over 10 years ago, I did not understand its combat system whatsoever. Now I do, and it’s fun! More fun than it probably ~should be? There’s something to be said about the original feeling more like drudgery, enhancing the bleak, aimelss grind of the purified Zones—compared to the update’s secret bosses and flashy UI. I don’t think the change is necessarily better or worse, it’s just Noticeable.
Anyway, aaalmost done with it; all Zones cleared, just got The Room to go. I keep being reminded that indie RPGs in general can point to OFF as a major inspiration/homage source. The nostalgia isn’t a huge factor to me (I played Undertale first, and wasn’t hugely into either fanbase); it is a solid, enjoyable experience, with a mostly-fitting soundtrack switchover and puzzles that I don’t regret not spoiling myself on. Except for those dang fish that is such a clever gimmick that also obliterated me multiple times despite being (probably? not intentionally) overleveled what’s up with that!!!!1! - Oh yeah, the soundtrack. Mostly very different vibes from the original, but it still hits. Zone 3 no longer puts static in my brain so I was actually able to play it this time, so that’s an objective personal upgrade! (Last round, between the soundtrack and combat, I ended up watching someone else’s playthrough for the endgame. Different experience for sure.)
Niche woes aside, I kinda regret “spoiling” myself on the endgame tracks; the playlist was autoplaying mid-art and I didn’t feel like restarting it, smh. But they still work pretty dang well out of context, and I’m looking forward to the intended listening experience!
*intentional wonky grammar in the subheading
not-OFF (music)
- “goin’ crazy,” a bop from a random reblog. Not familiar with the game it’s from, but it’s one of those songs I did not like at first then grew on me several repeats later.
- Also been revisiting Rossz Csillag Alatt Született, an early introduction (to me) to break-whatever discordant tunes—but orchestral! I swear I heard “Hajnal” somewhere long before discovering the album, but hell if I remember where….
- Speaking of songs I heard somewhere only to find the album some unknown disparate years later: “The Hymn of Acxiom.” Good haunting synths. Will give the whole album a listen when I’m ready to turn the repeat rotation.
not OFF or music
- ”A Mathematician’s Lament” is a thought-provoking read. I am still extremely not a Math Person™, but I do feel similar about people saying they ~can’t do art (anyone can make it! skill is earned, not innate! a very human urge to create gets educated out of most people and it sucks!!!!), so I think I get where it’s coming from.
- Unintended realization, also: I feel vaguely “tricked” into reading the full thing, because the way GitHub displayed the pages made it look a lot shorter than it ended up being. Listen, I swear I still have an attention span, but I see a tiny scrollbar sometimes and I balk. Things to remember with my own text-heavy pages, lmao. (Shan’t be shoehorning any breaks into this post, though! You’re on a blog, you know what you signed up for.)
- One of, if not the first series I was ever intenesly Into™ were the Warriors books by Erin Hunter. Born too early to be formatively influenced by insanely-well-produced cat AMVs, never too late to pop in when the whim strikes and see what the kids are up to these days.
It was on one such lark that I stumbled across Jumalanpelko, a standalone story about a cult and its newest “god.” It is a tragedy. Had me staring at my screen going “what the fuck what the fuck what the fuck” on more than one occasion. Really impressive for a comic that gives a major dramatic character a fuzzy moustache!
The art style is excellent, too; simple, effective, full of personality. Great use of shapes and palette blocking. Extremely relevant to what I was (theoretically) trying to do with my last big story project. Art styles to study. Look at the stark silhouettes and eye-catching gradations in the artist’s favorite panel from the comic’s first year. :ok_hand_but_it’s_a_paw:
…and some random outlinks from the endless Discord notehoard:
- You’ve heard of crouton dot net, but did you know there is crouton… 2!!? And there may be even more….
- I have no skin in the cozy game game but here’s a (much shorter) thought-provoking read: “I Hate Your Cozy Game.” Also, “No-One is Going to Buy Your Game,” which IMO is relevant to art across the board.
- untitled extremely regular anecdotal blogpost
what (else) the flyleaf been up to
- Ended up participating in ArtFight this year after all! Made 6, received 6, or 7 including a commission that the artist uploaded as an attack. Pretty neat!! The gallery site isn’t updated as of writing, but when it is, new stuff will be here.
- Besides the requisite random doodles, I also continue to toy with Blender. You, alas, will not see much if any of this until I get around to a 2026 art roundup, in whichever form that may take. I threw one for the last quarter of 2023 onto dA, because I guess I’m just putting my pre-2026 art where-ever and 2026 will go on its own special little gallery.
Theoretically this frees me to drop the 2026 stuff whenever. In practice I think I have made myself another bottleneck. Oops. - A lot of the aforementioned site updates happened today, as I was going through the unpublished commits on my machine. This particular site is long overdue for some additional updating (chiefly: about, projects, sitemap; and maaaybe a new default blog layout?). It, too, happens when I get to it.
Blablabla bemoaning of time as a concept. The more I block out furniture in Blender (dimensions.com, excellent resource) the more I’m like actually we really should just use metric for everything. The Month Day, Year format is already pointless for chronological organization, and I’ve long switched to military time to ease conversions with friends in other timezones; what’s another default measurement switchover?
And on that non-sequitur, that’s all for this round 👍