#i very badly need to update my redbubble

[pien-art]

Moiraine Sedai

( click image for optimal quality )

prints available here ! and it's also on my redbubble !

[fayesdiary]

Happy New Year everybody! Hope you had a wonderful celebration :D

Since it's the start of a new year I wanted to tell you about some updates and future plans and creative projects of mine.

First things first:

I'm preparing to open a Redbubble shop! It's partially as a joke and partially so that I can share my designs around, particularly the Team Grima and Team Sombron ones I had in mind for a while. (and by god I'm gonna take the opportunity to make Echoes fan merch since it's sorely missing) I do need to make five designs to open a shop and I want to do them right, but as soon it's ready I'm gonna post the link. When that day comes, feel free to just look around or buy something if you really wanna give me money that badly. If you don't, you can always come over at my art blog @fayessketchbook and tell me you like my art. It's free and I will love you forever.

I want to play more Fire Emblem, be the games I still haven't played, ROM hacks or emblemlikes. And I want to stream them if I can! I made a Twitch channel last year but I barely ever streamed last year, just played a little of Gaiden. But since I want to play more of Fire Emblem, it would be fun sharing it with you! I have no intention of becoming a Twitch streamer for now (mainly because it sounds like a pain and I really don't care enough to learn how everything works, also I'm a socially anxious introvert), but playing chill FE from time to time together does sound fun. No schedules or anything, just a couple of hours whenever I have nothing else to do in the evening. As for which games I want to play, well I am absolutely gonna stream all of Sacred Echoes ( :D), but other than that we'll see. Probably Walk with the Living, if only because I feel really bad for the anon who recommended it to me since I never got around to actually playing it.

I am still without a Switch and a job, so the Three Houses liveblog is still very much on hold for the time being. While I do find the project daunting and more ambitious than I can probably handle (since it's very much intended to be both a blind playthrough and a critical deep dive), I do hope I can start it this year, if only to test the water and because I think it would be a really cool long-term project. (also, regarding the above point: even if I get a Switch and a capture card, I will not stream Three Houses until I've completed all the routes to avoid jackasses coming in chat to spoil me or start shit about the house leaders for the upteenth time thus spoiling me. I somehow managed to stay almost spoiler-free through all these years and I want to keep it that way.)

I want to write more and finish at least one of my WiPs. I don't know if I actually will.

Oh also, a friend gifted me a PS1, which means among other things that I can play TearRing Saga on legitimate hardware, so that's pretty cool!

Anyways, that's it for now. If I forgot something I'll edit the post or reblog it, otherwise I don't think I'll make any huge blog updates until my blog anniversary next month.

Again, hope you all have a wonderful 2023! Love you! <3

[channelmono]

ANNOUNCEMENT! HIATUS AND EXCITING NEW PLANS

Greetings from the moon, my friends! If you haven’t already watched my last video, I’ll be going on break again from daily content (this is an important distinction), this time for an unknown length of time. Don’t worry, regular daily content WILL resume at some point, and I already have many plans of stuff I wanna work on ready to go! But I’ve realized: I need a break really badly, for a few reasons.

Let’s start with the logistics: filming has been an increasingly uphill battle. I’ve been doing this for a little over a year now, and in the process, I’ve continuously strived for improvement, both to make things more fun for you, the audience, and also to freshen things up and keep things fun for myself. Better editing, better filmmaking equipment, more costumes, more props, more intricate video ideas, and just generally trying to up my quality in all regards.

Recently, however, I feel like I’ve reached a peak where the quality of my work has started to negatively impact the enjoyment of it to a substantial degree. I can persevere through the hard work because I enjoy it, but something they don’t always tell you is that “hard work” is a constantly-changing standard that you must re-evaluate for yourself on a regular basis. What is a good day’s worth of work to you? Are the standards you put on yourself too much for any given time? Are you TOO hard on yourself?

As of the last few weeks as I was filming this continuous narrative arc, for the first time, I felt myself burning out because I was giving myself increasing workload to a standard of daily releases that was not made for it. I wish I was able to bring myself to gain more actual footage of my conversation with the moon in [Contact], but I couldn’t as I became so drained of creativity that I couldn’t figure out how to visually film that, and was just exhausted by previous filming sessions (it’s been really hot lately, and that kimono outfit is surprisingly really hard to get into, lol).

Speaking of difficulties in visually filming things, I’ve also struggled in resources and budget. As you could imagine, pandemic life has made it significantly slower to get better filmmaking equipment, more costumes, more props, and thus film more intricate videos, and also my ability to afford them has gone down dramatically. Finding work is also a pain, so I don’t exactly have as much financial freedom here.

Here’s a couple hard truths about what I do that I had to take into consideration: 1) filming content regularly in a way that’s fresh, exciting, continuously-improving is a monetarily expensive pursuit. 2) In this year-plus that I’ve been doing this project, it has NEVER been anywhere close to profitable. While I have a Patreon and Redbubble, they are very low-activity and I only make couple dozen bucks per month, which further decreases my options (I also can’t monetize my Youtube uploads, not that they get much viewership there anyway haha). I do this channel out of love and entertainment, but even I have a certain limit within realism that I have to work within.

So, what’s the plan for now?

Well, good news! While I will be holding back on mentally/financially intensive works for now, I will still be pursuing other projects aligned with NO SIGNAL STUDIO, and providing much-needed foundation for Channel Mono when it relaunches!

Within the next week, we plan to at long last have the NSS site up (we got the “nosignal.studio” domain!) to host our work, including Channel Mono. This will not only link our content onto an easily-accessible hub more sophisticated than linktr.ee, it will also also act as a blog/news outlet so we can make long announcement/update posts rather than crammed social media posts like these.

In addition, I’m pushing for more Patreon incentives, including a new set of perks I’m excited to try: CUSTOM MONO VIDS!

Starting from $25, you can send me a script every month for a short, simple video (dialogue skits, personal messages, video threats, etc.), and I’ll record it for you! There will be further tiers for additional complex features (different costumes, increased length, elaborate post-production, etc.), and depending on how it goes, I may pursue this even more!

I’ll also be opening more patron goals. Once I get past a certain budget threshold, I plan on holding monthly polls to decide what new outfits to get. Fun!

As for the future, the general trajectory for daily content will be more of a return to lower maintenance, less narrative-based skits, refreshing my work ethic and hopefully being less strenuous for me. I want to hit the ground running, but I don’t wanna quickly exhaust myself again haha.

This is only a respite for now. Once I recuperate and get my other endeavors finished, I should be returning to daily content soon. Thank you for understanding, my lovely monitors! 🖤🖤🖤