#pretty decent for not having a sketch (hahahah)

[kolkaslove]

Last drawing before new school year

Hm

[evanism88]

Once you get this, you have to say five things you like about yourself, publicly, then, you have to send this to ten of your favorite followers (non-negotiable, positivity is cool) 💞🌞🌈

Hello hello, thanks so much for sending me this super cute ask! I’m sorry I’ve taken so long to reply gahhh. Five things that I like about myself (tbh it was pretty hard to come up with five things??): 

My hair - I’ve straightened it permanently and I like how it looks. Also it’s at a decent length at the moment - just falls past my shoulders. 

My nails - this is honestly such a weird thing to like about myself (can anyone relate??? pls leave a comment if you do lol). 

I like my creativity. I love drawing, painting and sketching.

I’m generally a pretty positive person and don’t stress over the small things in life. 

I don’t hold grudges. If I’m upset about something or at someone, I usually forgive/forget after a good sleep hahahah. 

[magnusthemes]

Here’s to 4 years of MagnusThemes :D

4 years and one day bc it’s now 29-Jan and my anniversary is 28-Jan lmao wyd @ me lol I was supposed to publish a theme too but well it didn’t happen and I accidentally released it too early hahahahaha literally wyd @ me

I have no idea how I managed to keep this blog going for 4 years tbh, it’s really insane to think about the fact that I was only 16 (secondary 4) when I made my first terrible theme? I don’t even remember clearly how or why I even started, most likely it was just on a crazy whim, but it’s crazy because all I remember is Googling my ass off and sitting in front of my computer for hours on end and hurting my butt (yes, it happened) to make just one shitty theme... At the time it really felt like I’d just blindly dived into the deep end of a 3-meter swimming pool without even knowing how to swim because I had zero coding experience. Zero. Zilch. Nothing. I’d played around with themes for a couple of months (Yukoki’s Alive theme was my fave and it was like the ultimate holy grail of theme making for me, and I obsessively checked my favourite theme makers’ blogs daily for new themes) but while a lot of other people come into theme making with PHP experience, Javascript experience, HTML/CSS experience from elsewhere, I had nothing. Literally down the deep end for me!

And ultimately I ended up making such a mess that I now run a full-fledged theme blog which has become not only my main creative outlet but also my stress relief hahahah I’ve deleted so many of my old codes but I’m really happy that I decided to continue with this whim of mine over the years haha!

I guess I was just kind of searching for some form of validation that I felt I really needed because irl, 2014 was a pretty crap year for me and that was coming off another somewhat-crap year of 2013. I was getting shit from a bunch of unpleasant people at school and it made me feel like utter trash to the point that I genuinely contemplated suicide at many points of time that year. So it really filled me with joy that the crap theme got like more than 0 notes because it was something I made, and the fact that someone liked it enough to want the post on their blog made me feel that, hey, maybe I wasn’t unwanted and worthless, maybe I do have something I could be decent at (other than always screwing things up and/or lying down aimlessly on my bed). And I guess I liked it so much that I kept going, kept sketching up layouts to code, kept sitting my ass down in front of the computer for hours on end, and I really poured nearly all my feelings of unworthiness into this blog that eventually, it became something that I really looked forward to at the end of every stressful school day. And as that happened, I started wanting to know more, to learn more, and apart from HTML and CSS, I even picked up jQuery (and even pure Javascript now too!). During stressful periods, I was always on here, making stuff, coding, learning more, to take my mind off schoolwork. Even in the middle of A-Levels, I was coding, and I ended up releasing something the day before my Economics paper LOL what a mess...

Running this blog has made me feel like I can really do things, really put my ideas into action, because it’s really a one-man show of design --> code --> publish. Throughout junior college it was kind of a fallback for me in a sense that whenever I felt inferior that I wasn’t being a leader in school, wasn’t doing enough extracurriculars, etc, at least I remembered that I still have a very unique hobby of coding themes, because none of my classmates/friends knew how to code, and it became something that I really took pride in, that could set me apart from everyone else.

Eventually, when I applied to university, I was accepted easily because of my grades, but during the three interviews I’d had, I spoke about my code with pride, because it’s not easy to teach yourself a skill that many people pay hundreds and even thousands of dollars to learn. I remember one of the professors interviewing me for one of my grants remarked, hey, I’m really impressed that you’ve managed to learn code and to do all this without any background and all on your own! I felt super good because, yeah, I did do all of that! (Fun fact, that guy’s now the prof supervising my research LOL) And during orientations and stuff, I knew nobody, nobody at all, and it was pretty cool that I could always use “my hobby is coding” and “I do web design in my free time” as my fun facts hahahah and it’s really helped me a lot with my issues of generally feeling worthless and dumb and stupid. Even in actual computing classes (last semester I took a C module and got an A instead of an A+ which I’m still salty about, and now I’m doing an Arduino module), my Javascript that I picked up while on here comes in really handy, because I understand code logic, loops, functions a lot easier than my peers and my life’s been really easy, which has really given me a boost.

I even genuinely considered pursuing an IT-related degree for university before deciding on my aerospace engineering major, but honestly, at age 16, when I’d first started this blog, I could never have imagined that I’d make it this far. It was just by chance that I started this blog, There’s been both ups and downs, I’ve met and kinda bonded with a lot of people I now consider my friends through the theme-making community, but I’ve also experienced all the unpleasantness of code theft, design theft, credit removal etc and though I’ve wanted to quit many times over, I’m really glad I didn’t. I get asked a lot, hey Bev, what would you do if you weren’t coding? And my reply is always “I don’t know”, because I really can’t imagine myself without code. Maybe I’d be baking cakes, pastries, cookies? Who knows? 

Many many things and people have helped me get to where I am today, but I definitely wouldn’t be here if not for theme making. I’d probably be rotting somewhere, wasting my days away, but because of that one minute of madness resulting in me logging out and clicking “Sign Up” with a new email address, I’m here. Without you guys, I wouldn’t have gotten this far, and I’d really like to thank all of you for sticking with me to this day and for being a great bunch of followers and users. I may go ballistic sometimes, I may disappear for long periods of time without notice, etc, but I’m really glad that you guys are still here.

I can’t promise that I’ll be here more often (because most likely I won’t, due to university), but thanks for 4 great years, and here’s to many more years of MagnusThemes!