I decided I'm going to waste less time on the interwebs and use that time to get good at drawing. It's something I've always kind of wanted to be good at. Not to quit/replace my day job, just as a hobby. So I spent some money on supplies and came up with a few rules/goals:

• I will draw at least 10000 drawings. The idea is that I need to spend ~10k hours to achieve true mastery, and I shouldn't get hung up on any individual work. Obviously some drawings will take longer than an hour and not all my skill-building time will be spent actually drawing, but whatever. It's a nice round number and it's high enough to keep me humble. I'm not setting a specific time constraint, but at a hypothetical average of two drawings a day it'll take me almost 14 years to hit 10k. This is a long-term commitment.
• I'll go into each drawing with a specific purpose. Some aspect of the art I'm working on. Even if it's something simple like drawing straighter lines, the point here is constant progress. Every drawing presents an opportunity for improvement.
• If I post my work, I won't connect my name to it. It will always be either anonymous, pseudonymous but disconnected from my name or other pseudonyms, or under my real identity but attributed to someone else. This is partly so that I can express myself more genuinely (I'm shy) and partly because I admire the idea of a mysterious figure secretly making art for its own sake and not for profit or social gain.

Some additional notes:

• Just about every artist seems to strongly recommend studying figure drawing. This is probably a conspiracy, and I want in on it.
• For that matter, I should draw lots of other things, too. Even if I do specialize in, say, loli catgirls, imagine how much better loli catgirls flying F-14s would be. I'll be the Bill Watterson of loli catgirls.
• I will try not to consider myself "above" any technique. If I can save time doing something a faster/better way with the tools I have available, I will. This is not a substitute for proper study where it counts, but in the past with other skills I've wasted a lot of time trying to be some kind of purist and I want to avoid that.

So far I'm at 29/10000. Primarily working on fundamentals and training my muscles right now. I took a drawing class some time ago, so I'm not starting from scratch, but I do have to relearn a lot. I've been watching some speedpainting videos to pick up techniques and that's been pretty helpful. Once I get through this stage, I can move on to the crappy Inuyasha fanart stage, which hopefully won't last more than a few hundred drawings before I upgrade to the crappy Sailor Moon fanart stage. Then it's Green Hill Zone, and eventually I'll enter a cocoon (by making my DeviantArt account private) and later emerge, finally able to draw a convincing cute girl tying you up so she can tickle you mercilessly and blow raspberries on your belly.