Skincare is really difficult

I really hate trying to keep up with my skincare!

It's annoying to try and keep up with regularly. It's annoying to try and make sure I'm using the right stuff. You do one thing wrong and it all fucks up, and you spend more time reversing it than improving. 

Recently, the weather has been doing weird things and that's been affecting me. Philly is a lot dryer than where I grew up. For most of my life, I had weirdly waxy skin. Not dry, not oily, but a sinister third thing. My pores would be clogged with translucent waxy stuff, like blackheads without the actual dirt. Washing my face was actually difficult because I was repelling water, so I had a ritual of steaming my face down before I could start washing. 

This was all in the 2010s and people didn't gaf about skincare. BB cream had just hit the masses and people were completely painting their face completely matte and topping it with glitter from the craft shop. But now, in the modern era, I learned about a curious method from the east called "double cleansing".

When I was a teen in a humid valley, anything even slightly oily would give me whiteheads. Now that I'm older and I live in a different climate I flake. So I guess I need more help staying moistened like a snail, and the double cleanse helps with that massively.

I literally just swizzle some oil into my hand and pump some cleanser in, then mix them into a lathered emulsion. Apply this to a wet face and wash caveman style. 

My skin? squeaky clean. Hydrated. Moisturized. 

My pores? Unclogged. I haven't needed a pore strip in ages, the crumbs just fuck off.

I'm bouncy, smoothed, and thriving... Mostly.

SEO is a cruel cruel beast

If you've ever tried to make any sort of name for yourself on the internet, you'll understand how difficult it is to keep your head above the sea of endless posts. Google crawls so many websites with huge blogs of perfectly manufactured walls of text. Even on individual social medias, you have to fight against the armies of people with similar names and posts. 

Obviously, originality is key, but too much originality will put you on a desert island all alone with no followers. Keeping an eye on what's new and trendy will keep you associated with things that are currently being searched, but then you risk being seen as desperate for clout. And being seen as overly desperate is a death sentence. It's a pain, isn't it? 

When you google (or Bing) my name, I often only come up in 5-9th place. The results above me are all related to the anime Bleach!! When I started using the "Ichigo_42ga3" (and related) handles, Bleach wasn't running. Then it came back! Even worse, one of the songs the show uses is even called Monochrome! ARGH!!! How misfortunate! .·°՞(≧□≦)՞°·. ueeehh~ ueehhh~ 

Linking across my socials helps a ton though. Here's a tip: Every YouTube video is it's own page, and is indexed as so. Use that description box wisely!!! 

Go watch my rant videos blah

You see the title. I've been trying to stay on my video grindset. I'm not that good at it, BUT go watch the videos that I have posted onto my YouTube channel, ICHIGO MONOCHROME. Nya rawr.

The videos are kind of rant rambles about fandom craziness, or whatever. I don't know, I was just going off the top of my head. 

In that first video with the Fairly Odd Parents thumbnail, I was just stunned at the audacity of the stalker mindset. The pure delusion that comes with being so obsessed with a child cartoon character, that it wills you to repeatedly DM and then email the voice actress your unhinged love manifesto. Not a confession towards the actress mind you, an angry message declaring your LOVE FOR THE CHILD CHARACTER, and your offense at her insinuation that said character could love another cartoon her own age.

The other two (1) (2) was true, from the heart, dissatisfaction with the state of horror media commentary. Specifically when it comes to the sloppy, immature way people talk about amateur projects. 

It's so annoying seeing these shitty copy-paste thumbnails on shitty copy-paste videos just dogging on a highschoolers art project. Whether it's a webseries, a video game mod, a fangame, whatever, there is simply no reason to be going AVGN mode in your hobby critique video. Especially not when it's so painfully obvious by the cracking, theater kid voice work, that it was made by a KID.

Like, we get it. one-hit Slenderman monsters aren't original. They aren't fun to play against because there isn't any learning curve. The monster designs are boring. 

BUT... These. Are. Not. Professional. 

This isn't triple A $90 gaming. This is a zero dollar Minecraft mod that doesn't even take 10 minutes of your life. By forcing yourself to make a mountain out of a mole hill for content, you forced yourself to suffer for who knows how much longer just to collect footage. Forced yourself to sit there thinking about it, writing about it, editing a thumbnail for it. And for what? To scrape content off the back of a nerdy child? As stupid as it sounds, it's the dumb things that get under teenagers skin. Mfers will tear them down, call them cringe, say their creation is the dumbest shit they've ever played, all for the chance of a mediocre algorithm bump.

And then it doesn't even work because they're posting low quality content in an oversaturated genre with an exchangeable video thumbnail.

Let the damn kids make their stupid nextbots and fnaf clones. This is the practice run. Let them play.

Rant over. Nya.