Tremendo Blog

Nov 2025 Progress Report

Working on keeping consistent schedules amidst terrible slogs.

– Tremendo Dude

It’s been some time since my last post, so here’s a progress report for last month:

• Committed to a “part-time” schedule for working on personal projects with my partner
• Making unsteady progress on my part of an art trade with Luja, featuring her OC Cleo
• Battling cyclical waves of depression, which have been getting more and more frequent lately
• Viola’s been sounding better and better

Aside from mental health struggles, this month has been good to me. Good times with friends and family, and even some projects getting off the ground.

Personal Projects

In an effort to build steady momentum, my partner and I have committed to a weekly schedule of sorts for working on our personal projects, in addition to our other commitments. Nothing too crazy, just “part-time” hours right now: two 3-hour bursts a day, 4 days a week. We’ve been spending most of it so far planning things out, learning web-dev, researching different crafts, and buying equipment for the merch store we’re hoping to get off the ground.

In an effort to make ends meet following our passions, we’re working on putting what we have to good use, and committing to the goal of trying to make some kind of income through our crafts projects by March 1st of next year. Right now, we’re hoping to make heat-pressed custom clothing designs, stickers, and other paper goods, as well as a website that will eventually serve as an illustrated explorable “guide to life”.

Unfortunately, my writings and art have taken a major backseat. I was hoping to have made a lot more progress on the art trade and other drawings and writings I’ve been wanting to make, but sitting in front of open canvases for hours on end has led nowhere for me for far too long.

Aside from crippling mental health struggles, another part of the problem is that the drawing tablet which I’m using—an old Huion tablet that a friend gave me after my hand-me-down iPad Pro broke thanks to my cat—has been stuttering and freezing constantly ever since I “updated” my computer to Windows 11 at the start of October, which has made it basically unusable, as it seems to be incompatible with Windows Ink

I’m making due for now by borrowing a Wacom Intuos from my brother, but I’m gonna have to invest in a new tablet of my own soon if I want to keep drawing consistently.

Mental Health Struggles

I’ve been struggling a lot lately. The waves of depression that hit me for a week every 2-4 weeks have been hitting me more and more frequently, and the lethargy and lows that come with them have been absolutely crippling. So far it’s been pure hormonal dysfunction rather than any cyclical negative thoughts, so I’m thankfully not in any danger nor am I suffering all that much under these waves, but they’ve been absolutely disabling and annoying, and have impeded on my quality of life for way too long.

I’ve been planning on seeking out psyche services to figure out what’s going on with me, but a mix of low drive when I’m depressed and low urgency when I’m not has resulted in me waffling on this for over a year now. …I think I need a new plan. Or some external help.

To that end, my partner reached out to her own psychs, which specialize in neurodivergent-affirming care, depression, ADHD, and other stuff that I feel might be relevant to my situation. Despite being in the throes of it as I type this, I’m feeling decently hopeful. Just gotta learn what I’m dealing with, and fight to live the kinda life I wanna live.

Music Performance

On the viola-playing end, I’ve been making leaps and bounds. I actually made a post about this on Bluesky on the 5th, which I’ll adapt below:

Had a really fun studio session last night! Got together with my nephew, his band’s singer, and an old friend, showing off our stuff, putting heads together, even mic’d up my viola for the first time with an improvised multi-mic setup!

Went so well we’re gonna be doing it as a recurring thing, once busy times calm down.

I used to play viola my whole school life, though never really liked how I sounded. Was taught some bad lessons early on and never fully unlearned them.

It’s only now, countless years later, that I’m finally finding a sound I really like while working to regain confidence with the instrument.

I’m not there quite yet, but over the past few days I’ve improved astronomically, reaching the dexterity that I had back then with better sound than ever. Learned more of how to practice from Smash Bros than music ever taught me.

And now with a purpose to put it to work for? …That’s all I needed.

I never really had a reason to perform before. Was never motivated. But this changes things. I’m excited to see where it goes!

Beyond gaining proficiency with the instrument, my sound has gotten astronomically better thanks to, honestly, a more physical fix. Turns out the bridge on my instrument was mispositioned, almost a centimeter higher than should have been. Reset the bridge and broke it in, and it’s like I’m a whole new performer now.

There’s an old constantly-reposted “inspiring” story that gets thrown around on Facebook all the time, about a clarinet player who practiced all their life and could never get better, always ending up being seated as last chair in their school band. One day they left their instrument at home and had to borrow someone else’s for a private lesson… and immediately sounded fantastic in a way they had never sounded before. Turns out it wasn’t that they were unable to get better; their instrument was just broken.

The story is always posted with a tacked-on ending about how you never know what’s really going on with someone’s circumstances (“sometimes their instrument might just be broken”), but this story is… uncomfortably literal for me. Having to come to terms with the fact that my instrument was improperly set and that certain techniques that I was taught were the cause of my terrible sound, over the course of my entire 11 year career of learning this instrument through school orchestra classes… is kind of aggravating, to put it lightly.

Better late than never, I suppose.

So you’re back on the website?

I’ve been leaving this site hanging for a while now. Especially now that my partner and I are back on the web-dev train, I’ve been wanting to give this site a hell of a face-lift and make it more my own. Simple.css has served me well, but I’ll only get so far in making a site truly my own by relying on a pre-made framework that I’ve barely taken the time to understand.

But that’s a project for another day. For now, it’ll be good to at least have some use for the site. To that end, I’m at least gonna be trying to write these progress reports as blog posts moving forward, instead of throwing them out raw on Bluesky. Beyond that, I’ve waited far too long to put my story stuff online, and so I’m hoping to put a lil more spit-shine on the stuff I’ve been cooking and dish that out to you guys as soon as I can.

Anyways, I’ve written enough for now. Thanks for checking in! I don’t know how much I’ll be around quite yet, but I’ll make an effort to keep updating this site more actively and keep checking in on Bluesky when I can. Hopefully I’ll catch you around!