The Seventh Update!
It's another year! 🎆
And somehow...it doesn't feel like it took as long to get here as the other two. 🤔 Huh. Not sure why. I did look through my Instagram Stories archive to help me put this together, so, maybe that influenced me to change my mind...? A little...?
My 2025 started out...mostly hopeful. A new year meant more chances to accomplish what you couldn't do before and new opportunities to help you get closer to where you want to be. I couldn't help but get a little excited thinking about that. I had a list planned for everything I wanted to do for my DuckTales fanblog, and while I did run into some issues with completing certain tasks, I think I did a pretty good job at keeping to it for the earlier half of the year. Then in Summer, after my June Birthday Project, my momentum slowed...I took a break and tried pivoting over to some other stuff, but the energy wasn't the same...the year was starting to feel stagnant. There was some anxiety during the Fall that began to ease around late November. Aaaaand...now I'm back to being hopeful again, lol.
So, how did the goals from my six & a half update go?
- Going to sleep at a better time: Not much has changed with this, unfortunately. 💀 But lately, at least in December, I've been turning off devices before 12, so, that's...good. I can only recall like...two or three times earlier in the year where I was in bed well before 12. I seriously need to do better. 😐
- Being a braver person: I said that I wanted to try saying "yes" more often when invited to do things. I'm not sure how much I actually did this in 2025. But I still believe I accomplished this goal because of the three following bullets. ⬇
- Bringing back K-Tee's CreeativeWorks: This is a big one; yes! I did bring this back! And made a lot of progress! I launched my website in September, finally joined Fourthwall after I had a problem with setting up commissions on Fiverr again. I also joined TikTok after constantly going back-and-forth on whether I would. I don't have any content ready for it yet, but of course, I will...and I was able to figure out what was happening to my Zazzle listings! I got rejected for AdSense...twice, but I just need to keep adding more to the site to increase my chances next time...and there's always affiliate marketing, I said I would try that again.
- Voice recording again: I did do some of this earlier in the year. And now that some exciting changes are happening to my set-up, I'll be encouraged to do more of that! 😊
- Finding other sites and apps: I joined Cara for my original artwork and haven't done much with that account yet either, but with the 🅰️👁️ issues on other platforms getting worse, I'm definitely going to push myself to use it more. The place has a bit of a bot problem. 😭 They get taken care of quickly, though, so...it's not too, too bad of a problem...
I joined Threads back in February, and while there are things I like about it, it hasn't been quite what I was expecting. When it comes to the "For You" feed, it feels more accurate than Instagram's and you find a lot of people getting traction on there. But when it comes to me posting threads on my page, it's not very social...I know this could be partly my fault for mainly being a Like, Repost & Saver than a commenter, and of course, not everyone is going to be interested in what I have to share...but I saw a post speculating that a lack of engagement could be due to the algorithm. That it's making people nervous about interacting with posts that contain certain keywords. And well, I think it's true, because I sometimes redact or avoid posts to prevent unwanted suggestions!
- That's not the only possible reason; the search bar has a Recent Tab, but it shows every single post that contains one of the words instead of only when all of them are mentioned. (If you search for "night light", you'll still find threads with the word "night" without light and others with "light" without night.) Unless unique names and words are being searched for, a bunch of irrelevant stuff gets mixed in. You can shorten the timeframe and the order in which these things were posted, but you'll still struggle to find exactly what you're looking for. Placing a minus in front of things you don't want to see in the results and quoting to keep the words grouped together in mentions, doesn't work! Search bars aren't supposed to be like this! 😩
- Like Instagram, users have to repeatedly switch to the "Following" feed, and hashtags don't function like they originally did. They just get absorbed into keywords, making them pretty useless.
- Meta is purposely doing things that make it harder to be seen! It's so frustrating that a LOT of users have to go through this now...the view to likes / followers ratio is incredibly out of whack. 🫤
- The most engagement I've gotten so far with Threads, was on a Smash speculation post. That was twelve replies, which is fine for me. Especially when the average is one to zero.
- Don't get me started on thread suggestions showing up in my notifications...😑
I'm still keeping an eye on Domo.town. It's been going through some interesting changes. 👀 I've waiting for Oneblvd to have an Android version so I can test it out. It's aiming to be like classic Pinterest and Instagram. Speaking of Pinterest, I'm not sure how true this is, but there's a chance that Open🅰️👁️ might buy Pinterest...even if it isn't true, I still feel like they're going to get bought by another pro-Gen🅰️👁️ company that could care less about how their users feel about the situation... I'll probably end up deleting my account over there or archiving everything but one post helping people to find alternatives...
Another I've been eyeing is SketchTube. I want to get back into trying to animate things and this seems like a good place for it.
- Better time management: I don't know if I improved on this. 😓 I feel a little more organized with everything else but time...
- Guys...I am SO happy with what I was able to accomplish with my DT Blog: I figured out how to do navigation bars with drop-down menus and carried that info to my original art blog! I put together a multi-part April Fools joke! I found out how to omit my own pageviews from the blog! I made the Timeline Map! And I gave a full explanation to why my blog exists in the first place!
In other Delpad-related recapping: I'm still surprised that the official Disney Jr. social media account suddenly decided to acknowledge Mr. Duck on Donald (and Della)'s birthday! And I love how I stumbled upon the flat color version of the Villa Donaldo mural! Oh, and the pilot card info drop in October? That was very fun to experience.
I made about thirteen completed art pieces in 2025 and almost all of them had something to do with Delpad. 😂 Usually when I draw, I fully sketch out the characters by pencil and finalize it all in Clip Studio Paint. But I've started to lean further into a method where I lightly draw out the simple shapes, structure them better in CSP, print multiples of that version out to add details and then go back to CSP to finalize. Drawing Della and LP's height difference makes me nervous, but this method helps me out by giving me extra chances to get things right while preserving the original drawing. And, believe it or not, helps me reduce the amount of time it normally takes so I'm not spending too much of it erasing to get the proportions. I'm currently stuck on other fanart, but I hope I can get a few duck pilots done here and there. I do miss them, ha.
- I got to spend more time with my brother after he moved. We were looking forward to the idea of hanging out again but soon realized that we fell out of sync. 😓 Readjusting to each other's behaviors was...annoying, but we've been over that phase for a while now. 👍🏾
- Kirby Air Riders! Oh my GOSH. When that game got teased...I first wondered if we were looking at another Smash; it's a new system, and we've been getting them for each one, so, makes sense. Then I slightly joked about it being another Air Ride and quickly hoped I was right. When the Warp Star sprouted turbines, I screamed. I got teary-eyed. 😂 I've been saying they should make a
sequel for YEARS! And now, they finally, actually, made it??! 😭 AHH!
- It looks FANTASTIC! ...*sigh* Can't play it anywhere near now, though...🤷🏾♀️
- After my brother fixed the wheel of the bike he gave me, I was determined to have a Bike Riding Summer‼☀🙌🏾🚲🔥🔥🔥 And I did!...until I...eh, bumped into a parked car...(nothing was damaged, it wasn't that hard, but it did shake me up to the point where I took a break) and the wheel cap broke...😬 That's an easy fix, so, I'll just have to try again next year.
- I had my first bubble tea! 🧋 Sort of. It was black tea with almond milk and mango jelly. T'was pretty good. I did originally want a coconut milk tea with the traditional tapioca pearls, but when I asked to sample them, I didn't know they were served warm. 😅 Both the temperature and texture threw me off....and the coconut milk was gone. Maybe next time...
- In the latter portion of the Summer, I regained my interest in mascots and tried really hard not to reveal it. 😂 This led me into eventually buying a very amusing business book themed around the Phillie Phanatic in October. 😆 In addition to mascots, I've been thinking quite a bit about SpongeBob too. In March, I saw the Plankton Movie. And while it was ok, it was still...much better than the Sandy one. 😶 In June, "A Fish Called Sandy" got (properly) released and I couldn't get over how great some of these scenes looked...(,,⟡o⟡,,) The style of Season 1 replicated with more modern means...makes me miss the Classic Era even harder. 😞
- Didn't bake much in 2025, but I did make bread pudding in July. There either weren't enough ingredients, or I didn't feel like following the recipe accurately, so, I "measured it with my heart", lol. I used a combination of a walnut-cranberry loaf and slices of seeded bread. It was very, very good. 😙👌🏾 I meant to make a separate post about it closer to the day I baked it, but time got away from me again. 😅 I'm also supposed to make it again. I said I'd do it for Thanksgiving...then Christmas...then New Year's...I got the bread for it, so, it's still coming‼ ☝🏾😤
- YouTube's 🅰👁 age guessing rolled out in August and eventually got my KTCW channel. 😒 I'm not on it much, so, I didn't think to take any marked "For Kids" videos out of my history...but same happened to other newer Google accounts I made for job applications. 🤔 I'm doubtful that I ever watched YT on them...I guess that in itself triggered the 🅰👁, since it can't determine anything from my watch history. Bleh, I hope they get rid of it or an alternative comes to challenge them.
- I saw some interesting wildlife somewhere around the Summertime. 👀 I started to notice more hawks, I'm pretty sure I saw a bat twice...heh, a tortoise I showed my brother in the neighbor's yard, I saw a flock of bluebirds; it's been a while...and most surprising of all: a bald eagle! I couldn't believe my eyes! 😲
- It had been years since the last time I went out on Halloween. My family rarely ever did anything for it, and so, I don't have much of an urge to celebrate it myself. And there have been many Halloween nights that were on the verge of raining, which only added on to this. But this year was surprisingly dry. And even though I had already taken my walk for the day, I got curious about what the other residents would be doing. Can't remember if I invited him, but my brother wanted to join me on my brief stroll down the street. Heh, he insisted on cutting up a bed sheet to be a ghost. 😂 I was telling him not to do all of that still we weren't going to be out for that long, but he did it anyway. There was a good deal of people out; someone had decorated their vehicle with lights and gave people rides--never saw that around here before! I can't remember all the costumes I recognized, but there was at least one Bluey. 🤭 One of the neighbors had two masked people playing goofy music from their garage. Not very scary. 😂 Even though it was just a glimpse of what was happening around us, it was nice.
- In November, I was faced with yet ANOTHER laptop scare...someone on the network I was using, potentially got their computer hacked. It wasn't certain how far the problem went, so, a whole new router had to be ordered. I couldn't use the WiFi until everything was good to go, and Windows Defender refused to work no matter what type of scan I tasked it with. So, I had to install a program called Malwarebytes through a hotspot instead. I later had to install it on my phone too. (Foreshadowing) MB detected a handful of things it believed to be problematic. One of which, it labeled as a virus. 😐 This...was very bad timing. I was right in the middle of working on adding listings to my Fourthwall store! And I was planning on doing another promo before the holiday rush! 😩
I quarantined everything that was found and got Bitdefender for good measure. After that scan was clear, I started transferring my files to a couple of drives. Looking at the progress bar for the first folder was enough to tell me that this process was going to take a looong while...I tried working a little offline, but even that was halted. I caught a sinus infection a day after being exposed to the heavy winds that were plaguing my area. 😵
The other things MB detected didn't seem like a big deal, but I deleted them anyway. Only the supposed virus remained. I read that this was the type that could damage your computer if it infected something required for the machine to run, but over time, I started to suspect the threat was actually a false positive. Research on MB's history with detecting this virus, led me to other people who were in that exact situation. With the file transfers being painfully slow and hardly having the energy to accomplish anything else, I couldn't take it anymore; I went and deleted it. My computer worked as fine as it did before all of this happened. What a relief!
(But it wasn't fully over: Apparently, disabling the free trial through the MB app isn't enough to cancel it. You have to stop it through Google Play too...I discovered this a month later when I was missing $49.99 from my bank account...and then led into getting slapped with a maintenance fee the day after. 😐 Glad I was able to get both of these charges back...)
- 🦃 Thanksgiving: My health improved just in time to enjoy the holiday! My sister hosted it at her house with some of our family and a few of her friends. Before the guests arrived, I started watching A Chuck E. Cheese Christmas (it's probably best to watch this YT vid logged out). A pitch bible for a new series surfaced a year or two ago, talking about how the Christmas movie (not a special, like I originally thought, lol) was going to be the pilot for a series they were developing, and I had been looking forward to it ever since. It's a good beginning to whatever it is that the company has planned. (I'm conflicted with how they handled Jasper, but I'll leave that for another time.)
- I'm very thankful that this was a human made production. CEC's been embracing 🅰️👁️ in their advertising AND flooded their spinoff restaurant with all kinds of generated imagery. 😵💫Maybe not literally all of it is generated, but it's pretty upsetting, considering how much effort the artists used to put into the main restaurant's atmosphere in the past... and y'know, aside from other concerning things that come with 🅰️👁️. Must have been another attempt to save money...
I caught one of the parades for the first time in a long time. I missed out on the interesting music choices people were raving about for the Macy's one, though. 🤷🏾♀️ I think Peacock was supposed to stream the TV feed. If they did, I wish they had left it up afterwards...
- I finally got around to changing my phone's theming! 😆 I had Bluey and Jean-Luc as my backgrounds for about two years, I believe...😅 (I couldn't get myself to settle on something!) I didn't want to do something Christmas-y until the month was over, but I caved and went for a couple of festive Phanatic images for my backgrounds. I chose bells being jingled for my notification sound, and the intro to "Wonderful Christmas Time" as my ringtone. 😂 Every time these sounds go off, they fill me with glee. :3 (Now, to change my IG profile picture...)
- Affinity 3 debuted this year! I had been hoping to buy it if Clip Studio Paint ever went full throttle with a subscription service, and now it's FREE! This could help me improve the quality of my finished art! Especially for what I'm trying to sell. (I need to make sure it's still for commercial use...) It was available at the very end of October but I think I was weary about having to get a Canva account to use it. (And the whole virus-health thing tripping up my progress.) I downloaded it in November and couldn't get myself to play with it in the same day. There's a
definite learning curve here, but I'm willing to overcome it. 🤜🏾 💥
- 🎄Christmas: It started out kinda annoying. I was trying to watch a concert, but I kept getting interrupted by others who wanted to use the TV. >:( The day got better as time went on. In an effort to reduce the amount of work it usually takes to prepare dinner, and just to do something different, my brother ordered lamb over rice with breaded mushrooms, and falafels. He's been on a Mediterranean kick lately and the main course of this meal had become both of our favorite dish. 😋 Another stand out was the mac and cheese my sister made. 😁 I wouldn't be surprised if this was the same recipe my cousin used when she hosted Thanksgiving at her house the other year. So good!! (ﾉ^ヮ^)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧🧀
On to the Top Nine!
Aww, "Houseboat Hold" made first place! 😄 And the Phanatic didn't make it at all. 😂 But wow...this is the lowest it's been so far...I didn't come anywhere near cracking a hundred or even fifty. Last year, I got 1.2k likes with fourteen posts and a liking average of 23% from my followers. Now it's 253 likes with twelve posts and a liking average of 5% from my followers. I gained 39 followers, but the liking average dropped by 18%? And still managed to maintain my score of 97? 🤔
In spite of all the weirdness going on with everyone's engagement, I do thank you all for liking, sharing, commenting and even following me this past year!☺👍🏾
~*K-Tee ✍🏾👩🏾🐹
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