what is UP gamers it's your girl iso here with a hot fresh new NANOWRIMO-WINNING PROFILE YEAH BABY!!!!!!! Check it out here!: https://toyhou.se/24571870.arietis

I'm really excited about this!! I've been participating in NaNoWriMo every single year since 2010 and never even got halfway, so the rapid pace at which I made progress this year kind of shocked me! I think I really underestimated the amount of effort I tend to put into profiles, I'm just thinking about that first year I tried NaProWriMo and only gave myself 1000 words per profile completed and like. lmao. No wonder I burned out on it so fast!! Granted I think the profiles I made this month are a bit out of the norm; all of them have considerable amounts of backstory that were all doozies to write! Kinda the peril of having immortal OCs and setting that have several established historical events. Nonetheless, I'm happy I managed to get some stuff out after the severe drought my account's suffered over the past year or two!

If you haven't seen the other two profiles I wrote for NaNo this year, check out Humilia and Scorpius! I worked pretty hard on them, so I'd appreciate you checking them out! Thank you to everyone who has so far, and to everyone who's interacted with my bulletins; it really helped a lot with motivation!

For fun and posterity, here are my final stats for NaNo:

Honestly I kinda have to credit my victory this year mostly to having three-day weekends now... you can see pretty extremely obvious rises and falls that line up with my work schedule; during the work week I'd generally be pretty dead, especially later in the month, and then on the weekend I'd write so much that I could mostly coast through the next work week without falling below par. It was a system that worked, but it definitely left me really burnt out! I've never lasted more than a week or two before, so I finally got to experience just how taxing it can be to force yourself to spend almost every free moment at least trying to write. I had a lot of other things I wanted to do and keep up on throughout the month, but I just never managed to write enough on most days to feel like I was safe to engage in any other activity, even smaller things like responding to nice comments and being timely about minor IRL obligations. Pretty much the only non-NaNo thing I let myself touch this month was doing Neopets dailies, btw be my bestie on there already if you aren't also please look at baby alison. Thanks.

Anyway, it was definitely stressful enough to the point where I'm just relieved to be done and be able to do other things! I had a lot of plans to do other writing-related things once I finished, but I'm burned out enough to where I think I'm gonna just let myself chill for a couple days lmao, so apologies if I still end up being slow to reply to stuff! Definitely curious about how I'll end up tackling next year; it's too early to tell if winning means I'll feel pressured to actually win every year now or if finally winning once means the pressure will be off. But that's next year Iso's problem. Anyone else do NaNo or something adjacent this year? How's your experience gone? I'd love to hear about it and also I believe in you!!!

On to actually talking about Arietis! She should hopefully be a nice palate cleanser after the lengthy tales of agony and woe that were Humilia and Scorpius, though her profile did end up being longer than I thought! Just kind of the consequence of making profiles for the Siderean gods, I've found... I have enough important world events that kinda have to be addressed each time that it means they're always going to be doomed to be a bit pagestretchy! It was kinda funny to have Arietis' just completely gloss over some of the events that were big deals for Humilia and Scorpius, though. Risen Star?? Who's that?? I don't know them.

That being said, she's a character I like quite a lot, being one of my many exercises in "make a funny joke character and then think too hard about them, how they maintain their silliness in a cruel world, and how their actions affect those around them". She's been the most straightforward of the gods for a long time and still is, but it's nice being able to get some of her depths out there on paper. Virtual paper?? You know.

For once I didn't make any tweaks to my profile layout, so no updates on that front! I think the only other Toyhouse-related update I have is that people randomly started posting in my I Want To See A Story Where... thread again, and it's a thread I'd really love to see take off because I wanna see more lits!!! Consider subscribing and posting in there; my current request hasn't gotten any hits in 12 hours, so if you don't have anything applicable yourself you can come up with your own request! I know a lot of cool writers follow me and I bet you guys know some cool writers yourself, so consider spreading the word!

With that being said, I think all I have left is to address what's next! I have... quite a lot of things I want to do now that I'm free from NaNo's clutches, and I have no idea what I'll do when! Here's a list of some of my current priorities, in no particular order:

• Reply to stuff!!
• Catch up on Toyhouse things!!
• Play Bug Fables because a friend of mine kindly bought it for me on the condition that I liveblog it intensely, which is basically my hobby in life so ez
• Play this other game I told a different friend I'd play after NaNo.
• Go through and proofread/edit the profiles I wrote this month.
• Cement what I want to do with the flex tab on my new profile, code the layout of whatever I'm slapping in it, then implement it for at least the NaNo gang. Probably do the above in the process!
• Possibly figure out and add collapsible headers in longer sections to make the History tab on my meatier characters less frightening. At minimum I think I'd like to maybe have the RP History section initially collapsed, likewise maybe the same for the Likes/Dislikes part of Personality. Kinda think I might want to expand it into a whole "Preferences" section where I have little tables to plop their opinions on things like love, death, etc., which would either be under a subheader like Likes/Dislikes and that whole zone would be auto-collapsed or it might be something for the flex tab...??
  
• Implement the various tweaks I made to my profile layout during NaNo to the other characters with the same layout style.
• Convert characters with broken profiles into my most recent layout type, which I have been needing to do for like- holy fuck 7 years? Anyway (continues not doing that)
• Go through the Siderea world and edit things to crosslink to other pages/profiles for greater ease of navigation and ~exploring~. Ideally also add anchors and some form of TOC since I found myself wanting to just link to specific sections a lot in my profiles during NaNo.
• Go through said world and either edit things to have updated information or, more easily, provide some kind of little box at the top of pages with outdated info saying what information should be disregarded. Kinda want to do a full redo of the god page
• Work on the various zodiac pages in said world to at least have some bullet point/TL;DR info.
  
• Make a Christmas list and finally take pictures of my pants sorry mom   
• Make worlds for my other settings to copypaste existing info into and at least have exist to attach characters to.
• Make Siderea world pages about death, media (AKA specific in-universe books/movies/tv shows/etc. bc I keep thinking about that), religion, locations, Asterismorum, god-affiliated organizations like Nepsis and the Mayblossom Society, etc., I am definitely forgetting something or another that I keep thinking about...
• Figure out some way to convert the Asterismorum wiki page into a decent-looking world page but also kinda solidify it more.
  
• Work on cementing how the Siderean calendar works. Also the Dream Sea. Also Leonis and Virginis' lineage. And Ishtar's posse. And Orion and Rigel's followers. And-
• Also probably make some page somewhere about anima mundi, prima materia, and viriditas bc god damn this month made me realize how badly I need something I can just link to when those come up.
• Catch up on RP stuff since I've been neglecting that for a month...
• Draw some low-effort High Quality:tm: refs for the different Siderean zodiacs to put on those pages and also just kinda define what the baseline of each zodiac even is.
  
• Make any amount of story progress in Genshin Impact lmao or at least get myself into doing daily stuff or at least keeping up on events as they come out... got back into it for like a week and then NaNo happened rip
• make more god bios   
• take my a/c out of the window it literally snowed yesterday but ughhhhhh it's such a hassle man. on the note of apartment complaints, resume begging my landlord to fix the washer and dryer pwease
  
• Diagnose my OCs with Neopets, the most important thing on this list am I right fellas
• Make more threads here!! I've got a couple ideas for discussiony/show-offy threads, though I'd have to do some skimming to see if they're already covered!
• Be more active in threads here!! And just in general!!!
  
• Convert a bunch of in-profile images and all of my music embeds to some other file hosting service since IIRC Discord is doing stuff to mess up off-site embeds soon and sta.sh breaks images a lot + doesn't do music. I actually knew about that before I continued relying on it during NaNo, but it was like Right before that I heard and I didn't want to distract myself from prep SO
  
• ok i am listing just like everything i feel like doing in life in general at this point i will stop myself here.

That's a lot, and there's def more casual fun stuff I want to do, too, plus things I've probably forgotten! If there's anything on here that you have a vested interest in me accomplishing lmk, but otherwise I intend to put very little pressure on myself for at least a couple days and mostly focus on reading, funny casual OC content, and perhaps a Wee bit of video gaming.

Okay I am done thanks for reading!!!!!!