kumquat | 2020 year in review

inspired by

lapiscave! after fifty years my 1.7 gb twitter archive has finally downloaded and now i can comb through my year in overly fine detail.

JANUARY

having ot3 feelings about chihayafuru because i had just caught up with the manga
started doing mini gouache paintings in my hobonichi techo... very ambitious of me
watched little women and absolutely fucking lost it when siyao and i found the screenplay
"i’m interested in verkwan." (1/11/20) thus started my deep dive into caratdom

FEBRUARY

i became mutuals with risa :)
thought a lot about pristeen this month, archive is kind of buggy and isn't loading a bunch of my tweets but i was tweeting about 98line au, verwoo comphet, nysc
around the second week of february i decide i'm endeared to wonwoo and rapidly go down the rabbithole: "there is no one more attractive to me rn than this fox looking volcel bookworm with oral herpes" (2/26/20)
started doing the daily nyt crossword without checking and developed a streak!
covid is starting to spread outside china in considerable numbers and i start to get anxious even though nobody around me cares: "i would follow topics or whatever twt wants me to do if only they would add coronavirus as a topic" (2/21/20) now every day i am bombarded with twitter suggesting covid-19 as a topic to follow... RELEASE ME!
went to my last "college party" for scot's bday, where i was cosplaying an egirl

MARCH

"wonu cute wonu fluffy wonu emotional support catboy. questions?" (3/2/20) "wonu cute.. wonu round... wonu fluffy wonu smiling wonu huggable wonu cat who jumps into ur lap and rubs his head against ur arm...." (3/6/20) wonwoorideulism: the dark descent
picked up knitting again and made a silly little beret, my second hat ever
covid news and super tuesday news is a terrible double whammy for my anxiety. the first us death/outbreak is at a nursing home 10 min from my house and i cancel my spring break flight. we get the email about school shutting down in the middle of my 9 am critical video game studies class on 3/12, which i never attend on time ever again. i also take the gre on this extremely eventful day?
patrick buys me animal crossing: new horizons which takes over my entire life for a hot second.
emily shaves my head. I'M EGG.

APRIL

started watching qcyn2. "icb joey chua is my specific chinese ok boomer girl kryptonite" (4/8/20)
mid-april i stop doing hobonichi techo paintings. ran out of content from my fake and empty quarantine life!
"i'm pivoting to soonwoo" (4/23/20) courtesy of dollyeo's fake dating fic, and like a week later i'm a diehard soonwooist
slowly thesis grinding towards the deadline and i finally turn it in???!!!!
i became mutuals with sam :)

MAY

now that most of my finals are ending i have to start seriously working on the disorientation guide... and i fucking hate it!
i continue to read farmer_lars 97z sns au and it sustains me: "does farmerlars fitzgarbage know they're scheherazading my stupid suicidal ass through every day" (5/19/20)
a lot of packing and a lot of selling furniture and being aggro about buying and selling group etiquette, and also being aggro at our dumb asshole landlord (spills over into june)

JUNE

posted my kyulwoo fic for gg jukebox and flew home!
i learn to knit entrelac and socks
i get roped into this absurd horrible group chat with people who called me a sjw in high school who are just now realizing that maybe they shouldn't be racist, and am constantly bitching on private about how weird this is. "the more i think about [redacted] and that whole group of people the angrier i get. im lying in bed with a throbbing headache behind my right eye practicing the speech im going to rip into them with whenever we have our cursed zoom call 🤬" (6/11/20)
i became mutuals with frog :)

JULY

drew these little animals with fruit as thank yous for a giving circle and ended up making sticker sheets... baby's first sticker designs!!!! i hate the way they look now but it was very exciting in the moment
learned to knit 2 socks at a time and started a cardigan for isha
wrote like 500 words of my original direct cut fest idea and gave up but at the VERY last minute like after the official deadline i banged out my jeongcheol atla au

AUGUST

started watching haikyuu!! on metastream with friends. little did i know...
started playing fire emblem: three houses seriously. i started in february for my video games class but never quite got the hang of it, but i got to chapter 12 and then sunk like 70 hours into it over the course of 2 weeks
turned my little brother into a carat??
returned to my hyewon roots for gg jukebox: mixtape round, also wrote a super super short qcyn2 ficlet while i had the momentum
complaining about disorientation guide which continues to drag on and make my life a living HELL!!!!

SEPTEMBER

started reading haikyuu fic in earnest, beginning with deanpendragon godly tsukkiyama archive in siyao's apartment right before we go stargazing in the middle of bumfuck nowhere. towards the end of the month i begin to pivot to kuroken
producing endless drafts of my statement of purpose. we're really in it now. i keep having terrible horrible no good very bad days after finding out that my top choices are pausing admissions alongside other awful news (eg rbg died)
i slowly get back into digital art again. "im working my way up to the lesbian cat ears kuroken art i’ll draw someday" (9/3/20) i still haven't done this!

OCTOBER

did a significant amount of inktober and put the most time/effort into original illustrations i've made like... ever! cut about a week short because i realized i had to get my shit together and apply to grad school by a more or less self-imposed deadline because i have control issues
read bell, book, and candle by skittidyne and got fucking truthed. i think this is when i realized i was in real deep with haikyuu. "mom i want him (kuroo tetsurou wiggle animation) for him (catboy kenma)" (10/9/20) WHO SAYS THIS SHIT??? EVEN ON PRIVATE??? CAN I HAVE SOME SHAME?
i turn 23 and hang out with my friends irl more than once. we also start a new dnd campaign... it's a libra season miracle <3

NOVEMBER

applied to grad school. election happened. nothing to say because i spent the entire time reading kuroken archive
back to drawing. my anxiety about my art twitter gets increasingly frenetic and i cobble together a half-formed portfolio website, get rejected from like 3 graphic design jobs, and immediately pivot to drawing only fanart. i also apply to and keep getting rejected from fanzines which is not good for my self esteem but is hopefully good for my overall resilience...?
highlight of my thanksgiving break: "me discoursing with ao3 user hwarium in the dms of my art account about ethics of the poppy war while [professor] asks me and two middle-aged women i don't know for pumpkin pie recipes in our group text"

DECEMBER

after what seems like fucking forever i finish my final projects (comics that shouldn't have been as long as they were) and GRADUATE!
private twitter becomes me constantly freaking out over my inability to draw but it's fine. i go back to clip studio and push myself to draw more backgrounds? i also have a bit of a breakdown over commissions prices, make a graphic and scrap it, etc. i feel a lot of shame about posting so much haikyuu fanart on my art account, but keep doing it anyway. also drew some of my first fe3h fanart and started journaling about my art, and seeking out actual resources on color theory/technique.

ok i can't believe i actually went through and did that. if you're still here i am SO sorry you had to read that. i'm going to draw a lot this coming year and try to take better care of myself... don't really have any reflections other than that! this year is sure to be full of big changes and everything feels very uncertain for now, like i'm just waiting for the skies to clear. but thank you to my friends for sticking with me and dealing with my complete unhingedness <3 here's to 2021!