Semester Midterm Presentation

Jess Soffian

I started this semester off with two major goals:

• Survive
• Graduate at the end

...which seems easy enough, except for the ADHD and the national adderall shortage, and the incredible surge in my perfectionist tendencies right in time for the semester to start, and the senioritis from being in my now fifth year of college on top of the burnout, and the medical appointments I'm having to rearrange my life around, and the many many other distractions pulling my attention in a million directions at once. But besides those things, I should be okay, I said. My schedule is pretty good and I like my classes and all my teachers. I'll be fine, I said.

(And then I got behind in all of my classes)

But aside from that, doing great! Halfway through! So here's what I've been working on.

The Plan

...that was the original plan, anyway. It started out okay; I made a patreon , although there's nothing on it yet. But then I got lost trying to make a website for my comic.

All:
How do you get lost making a website, Jess?
Jess:
[meme image goes here]

Basically, the problem was that nothing allowed me enough freedom of customization, and when it did it all just felt so corporate. I kept getting hung up trying to change things that I felt should be simple but weren't, like being able to place a white box on top of an image and then text on top of that. I kept bouncing back and forth between different website builders, trying to find something I liked. I:

• got mad at Wix when it wouldn't let me connect an existing domain I already pay for without also starting a paid subscription with them.
  
• messed around in Squarespace for a while but couldn't get it to do what I wanted
  
  
• made a tumblr account for the webcomic but couldn't find a theme I liked and instead bounced around between three different themes making little adjustments for three weeks
  
  
• went back to fiddle with Squarespace only to find my free subscription ran out and I had to pay money just to edit the site
  
  
• took a break to work on other projects (more on that later)
• and then, while combing through old resources, happened upon rarebit.
  
  

All:
Oh, so that's why we're here.
Jess:
Yes. I decided it would be easier and more rewarding to just use this template, open a neocities account, and teach myself rudimentary html and enough css and javascript to customize the template as needed. Y'know, simple. But I'm pretty happy with how it's going so far; the code for the template is heavily commented out and doesn't require much adjustment. Anything I can't figure out I can probably find with a quick google. And html isn't that bad, really. So I'm making this presentation via html code on this website I'm building to show off what I've learned.

All:
clap

By the way, remember those other projects I mentioned? In the middle of all this website fussing, I had to put literally everything else on hold to deal with my first major tabling event: Nightmare Weekend Richmond.

I was super excited. I chose not to get a job this semester in favor of focusing on graduating, but I was hoping I'd make some money at this event. Plus it was a great way to get my work out there, and I was and am still proud of what I had to offer. Just look how nice the prints turned out!
My roommate and I were all packed up and ready to go. On Thursday we dropped out stuff off, got our badges, and built our table setup so that we'd be ready to hit the ground running when the con opened on Friday.

All:
So how did it go, Jess?

Jess:
Friends, it was bad.

Part Two