"you want to vibe like this guy" Natural Habitat Shorts

originally created January 1, 2024 ✦ republished February 8, 2025

(Originally posted on Instagram, Mastodon. This retroactive post is copied from the Instagram post.)

Ringing in the new year with a fanart for Natural Habitat Shorts!!! Their shorts are AMAZING, and you NEED to watch them NOW, so GO DO THAT ALREADY \(†◻†)/

This one was messy to make, since I made the background last 😛 I had to do a lot of erasing and undo-ing before I finally figured out a way to make everything look decent. I think the result works fine—I used quite a few of Krita's special brushes to create special effects, and I had to change the color of the signature and date from black to white using the fill tool. Also, I did the non-lazy shading method, where I pick a darker color based on the base colors, instead of just using an ugly-looking transparent black shadow.

About the previous post, in which I said much stuff that would cause a substantial degree of alarm.... I'm gonna be honest, I feel kind of pretentious and self-centered writing these whole paragraphs about it, when it's probably only gonna matter to, like, a single person. I don't really feel anything about what I wrote that day anymore. Though, I do vaguely remember what I felt when I wrote it, and in the time after I posted it.

When I wrote that post and drew that drawing, I was in a really negative state of mind. I had apparently gotten sick twice in a row, and I thought the fever and fatigue I had was always going to debilitate me and was never going to end. There was also another reason, whose details I decline to specify until I move out of the house, but I will say that it involved the practice of pseudoscience by some household members. It didn't directly affect me, but I felt frightened that said household members refused to listen to common sense and reason. It felt like time was being lost and things were working against me, and it all piled up into this extreme frustration that I desperately needed to relieve myself of somehow, otherwise it would crystallize and fester in the back of my mind and ache my muscles and squeeze my stomach and torment me the way OCD did to me last year. So I choked it out into what became a rather dark Insta post.

For a few days after making the post, I was afraid of what would happen if the words I wrote were to reach the wrong eyes and escape my narrow reach. Thankfully, my Insta account is private; and, rereading the post days after I wrote it, I don’t feel that anything I wrote is something I need to regret or be worried about. In between writing that post and this one, I recognized that I was thinking in terms of “always” and “never”, forgetting that change exists. I hadn’t healed yet, so I had to give some time and a great deal of patience in order to allow my emotions to climb out of their rut on their own. I wish I could make up for the week I missed out on, but oh well. There’ll be more breaks, and brighter days, and more opportunities, later. I’ll just make myself feel better by telling myself “winter is just a cursed season for me, I have spring and summer 😛”

And so that’s the very-very-long story behind the previous post. Ok I need to sleep gnite 🛌🛌🛌🛌🛌🛌🛌