11

It sure is 2023 all right.

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Before I launch into another aimless text wall, a quick rundown of things I want to cover this post:

• follow-up to last year’s project rambling
• thoughts on a recently-finished mini-project
• general “goals,” moving forward, site and roundup and blog things

Seems simple enough! I give myself another ~100 words or so for it all to explode into walls anyway, but now it will be marginally less aimless.

The Project Section

So, TL;DR of that project post from December 2021:

Okay So.

404

(I like how I said I was gonna Officially™ stop letting this story/world/whatever “haunt” me and then it immediately proceeded to re-enter my head at least like. once a week. filename: 404 revival tour.mdp)

Been idly entertaining the idea of just churning out a daily (not realistic) $regular-ishTimeframe 4-panel comic. Or webpage. Or… idek, something. Story and theme be darned, these people refuse to live in my head silently. This is why I refuse to call the “project” abandoned or scrapped or what have you; characters from older stories do not linger with me so.

Idk, maybe 2024? Because numbers. Maybe sooner. ~Who knows~.

the other thing

Shortly into the new year I turned one of the story’s oldest scenes into a full-fledged comic. Then self-critiqued it. And a metric crapton of other stuff got added and shuffled around the site, too, not all of which has been publicized. The site is slowly turning into more than a glorified gallery, though the standalone art pages remain a bulk of the website’s content.

Oh, and that mini-project. First, a relevant snippet from the giant “Tale of Two Projects” post:

I’m wondering if, instead of dedicating myself to a full-ass comic start to finish, I could use some (modified, expanded) version of the “summary,” interspersed gratuitously with doodles, concepts, and actual comic segments—and continually update as needed, both to add new scribbles and even make story changes as I deem necessary. Hell, I could even try sketching out an entire “episode” in one go, use that for a less-collaged version of the story, and update those pages if and as they’re finished?

Have I done this for The Canon Story Proper™? Erm… yes and no. Yes, I devoted several months to drawing a more fleshed-out colorscript, the first episode of which got expanded to a full more-or-less complete page (ignoring that it’s missing a few scene-level dialogue beats and some parts have changed since aaaaaaa). But also, no, that’s not exactly what I had in mind earlier, and at any rate I don’t feel like updating this in accordance with the aforementioned scene changes.

Something I’m learning about myself is that, when I am mentally “done” with something, I am D-O-N-E done. I am loathe to go back and edit or fix it and, if it reaches the point where said edits would necessitate revising a majority of the thing anyway, would rather just redo it from the ground up. It feels like an utter chore if I have to make said changes, which was very fun to deal with in academia and is not something I’m keen on subjecting myself to in free-time creative pursuits.

This, of course, feeds heavily into my chronic perfectionism; I know I’m almost definitely not going to (want to) change a bunch of things once it’s out and published, so the pressure to “get it right” beforehand is magnified tenfold.

My challenge now, of course, is to learn how to work with* this bundle of neuroses. (*Not against; been there, tried that countless times, and mostly it’s had me running in circles.) And guess what, there’s more self-analysis where this came from:

the other thing’s mini-thing

> be me
> think of funney little AU idea
> it’s September, idea is vaguely Halloween-ish (in that it involves vampires and were-not-wolves, and is generally kind of silly but also spooky and morbid or whatever)
> wouldn’t be the first time I did a Halloween-ish ministory
> it sure is September, aka early enough to start making it & potentially have a backlog for weekly or even daily updates through some part of October
> it’s October
> wait shit fuck since when did—
> can still be done if on speedrun (speedran? spedrun?)
> scrap sporadic prose-based starts for a “shorter” version that alternates prose and images
> actually start making webpages
> oh shit the art is taking way too long already, spontaneous style switch go
> oh fuck the pages need to be split for better pacing
> Halloween comes
> Halloween goes
> Well. That Is Just Too Bad. a majority of the thign is already written (albeit in more rough notes than any solid “draft”) & the already-done parts are too far along to scrap wholesale
> also this is a good experiment with medium, if the rest gets treated accordingly (like a quick little experiment) then who cares, it’s not going to get any more belated
> clueless.jpg
> use up backlog within first two updates
> rewrite one particular part from the ground up multiple times
> pain.jpeg
> this isn’t funny or remotely little anymore, stuck on one more part, world is a fuck 5000 scrapped panels
> oh god if this is what doing a “mini” story is like, is it just inviting failure (truly the root of all evil and not a normal and expected part of life) to even think about doing anything longer
> brain activating Done.exe
> on the other hand if it sits incomplete like this for months it will irk me 5ever
> churn out the entire ending in one long sitting
> Just Like Academia.thonk
> but still
> it’s
> d
> it’s d.
> it done??????????????

It… done :^O

I bragged a bit in the “postscript”, and… you know, I think between that and everything above, I’ve kinda said most of I wanted to? It was a Process, but I stuck through it and finished anyway, yay and self-backpats and such and whatnot. Even if the story itself is a bit ehh, I think it’s more successful than the colorscript in combining images, text, and text describing those images (something I’ve increasingly tried to incorporate when I use pictures at all, as opposed to slapping it on as an afterthought).

The drafting process was hit-or-miss; sometimes I had very clear mental images going in, but mostly I was winging it in writing, then winging it in art, then readjusting the writing to fit the art. Some degree of adjusting here is probably inevitable; even with pure-image comics, compromises have to be made if and when the script overestimates how much text can reasonably fit in a panel. But I’m still chasing a more organic process, one that’s less “write everything, stop, draw everything,” because more than once that pause between triggred the Mental Doneness. Hmm.

I don’t have any real conclusions here, tbh. But I’ve just gotta keep experimenting, trying new stuff, and generally distancing myself of the idea that a story is One True Unshakable Canon™ that springs forth fully-formed from the forehead of its creator. That way perfectionist traps lie.

general goals etc.

I’ve noticed over the past few ~weeks (months?) that random deviantArt uploads are being flagged as “mature” to guests, even though I can count on one hand deviations I’ve actually marked for mature content. Descriptions are still readable (for now), but the art is blurred to obscurity.

This is, to say the least, Mildly Unfortunate. dA is my most comprehensive gallery, bar none (over ten years of use will do that), and I like being able to direct people to it! It also happens that, for lack of other social media, dA descriptions are the closest thing I have to regular updates, and I do still like yelling to the Internet void on occasion. If the random login-walled deviations become entirely inaccessible to guests that will suck. And hell, the description visibility isn’t even reliable as-is. Wild how the internet manages to be both immortal and more ephemeral than quicksand.

Anyway, the solution to this is staring us both in the face: use my own site more. Moving my entire dA backlog over here is… daunting, to say the least, let alone GitHub’s 1–5GB repository limit (one I’m really, really surprised (and glad) I haven’t run into yet). And I’ll probably never stop uploading over there wholesale.

But I definitely don’t want it to be my #1 update hub.

One of these days I’ve really gotta figure out RSS. Until then, a Thought™: in conjunction with monthly art roundups (which have their own quirks but still), I’ll make blog posts throwing together

• links to stuff I’ve published (on dA and elsewhere, ideally primarily here; site updates go mostly unannounced unless there’s art attached, which imo is a bit of a shame becaue I work hard on this stuff dangit), and
• other stuff I find interesting/relevant to mention. kind of like I do with roundup descriptions now, except it won’t necessarily be art-related!

Might be rambly. Might be flat bullet points. Might be some mix of both, whatever I feel like. We’ll see ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Unless/until I figure out RSS, your best bet for being notified about these is to watch me on dA, where I’ll probably link them in the roundup descriptons or make status updates or something. I don’t feel like setting up a Proper Email Newsletter but doing something manually (with signup via Google Forms) is an option, maybe, but also screw Google and I should probably not be trusted with random strangers’ email addresses anyway. (No nefarious plans, but potential liability issues ahoy!)

Hell, maybe I’ll rev up the old Dreamwidth again as a pseudo-feed; it has RSS built-in, I think, and could also function as a guestbook/comment section. I don’t knooowwwww I’m trying not to overcomplicate this for myself >:V

TL;DR new year’s not-quite-resolution is to use my own site more, ideally as an actual hub, with dA being secondary.

miscellaneous things I want to do at some point

• You’re gonna be the death of me:
  • finish uploading the rest of the colorscript
  • designnote spoiler pages
  • revamp main story & cast indexes
  • publish a complete outline, keep winging it from there
• main site (you are here):
  • new homepage + plaintext layout
  • offshoot TFE repo? mostly to separate pages, have the character writeups together more coherently, maybe drop some retrospective commentary
• Toyshelf
  • section for art by others?? idk I like having a personal hoard
  • obligate newhell update(s, as and if it keeps developing)
  • condense wolf-skull + hellrabbit pages into a general “Ygbtdm minor/side character” thing? though TBH this would probably be better on the main site just wholesale
  • disaster crew “links” (Toyhou.se-esque) but it’s like a mini storytelling thing. that’s reaching for my attention next tbh

These will not all necessarily get done, or even make sense to people who are not me. That’s fine. If they happen, I guess you’ll know about ’em ;V

footnote about the layout

Yes, I know the year at the bottom in the footer there says “2022.” No, I’m probably not going to change it since I do (as mentioned above) want to recode the plaintext layout; it looks fine as-is but uses a bunch of overrides. Backend stuff.

“Why monospace?” because that’s what the post looks like as I type it in my text editor (ol’ reliable Notepad++) and I’m a sucker for UIs being used in frontned design—or, in layman’s terms, post looks similar on blog as post looks as typed. I’m not sure Consolas (or whatever monospace fallback your browser might be using) is particularly readable or if it’s just me having gotten used to it, but eh, here it is.

Okay, that’s it for this post, you’re free now \o/