#trying to stick to my self imposed schedule

[l0yalty]

plot call, if you are interested in plotting with any of my characters please like this and i’ll im you.

[cursedonyx]

Well folks, here it is. Over a year’s worth of work, 115 chapters, almost 500k words, and Hogwarts Legacy, the Price of Power, is officially finished.

I can’t thank you all enough for joining me in this journey and sticking with me when I occasionally rambled, missed my appointed upload dates and had to force out some sub-par content to keep up with my self-imposed schedule. It’s been a delight to read your comments, to hear your thoughts, to see you all get captivated and invested in this little puddle of nonsense I created.

So thank you once again to everyone who’s been with me from the beginning, thank you to those who’ve joined me partway through, and thank you to those new readers that have just begun. I’m going to have to go back and try to reply to every comment I’ve had as I’m sure I’ve missed plenty along the way.

I’ll be taking a small break from writing to give myself time to decompress before I begin anew, because for those of you who’ve stuck with me and made it this far, I’m delighted to announce that a sequel is in the works.

Stay tuned, subscribe and follow, because Hogwarts Legacy: The Cost of Love will be coming soon.

[anti-dazai-blog]

36- Playing dead (and other complaints)

Welcome back to the Anti-Dazai Series!! Please be proud of me, I’m sticking to my self-imposed once a week schedule. 

________________________________________

When We last left off, Akutagawa and Atsushi were fighting Francis on top of the Moby Dick. Meanwhile, Kyoka is trapped as a captive in a small government plane. Things are not looking good for our protagonists.

If you’re reading this, you already know what happens afterwards: Akutagawa and Atsushi defeat Francis, retrieve the control device for the airship, and manage to stop the countdown. Some mysterious person from the shadows hacks the device and the airship nearly crashes, but Kyoka is willing to sacrifice herself by crashing the military plane she’s on into the airship. 

She goes through with her plan, and Akutagawa and Atsushi make it safely back to shore.

Naturally Atsushi is traumatized. Not so much from the fight with Francis, but rather from the one person he managed to save killing herself for his sake. 

When he first met Kyoka, she was about to sacrifice herself for the sake of the mafia, and then for the sake of the civilians on the train. Atsushi managed to talk her out of the former and protect her from the latter. Then, the agency was going to hand her over to the police, who would execute her for her crimes. Atsushi begged them to give her a chance and allow her to stay in the agency. Even Kyoka herself tried to turn herself in for her crimes. Then she was captured by Akutagawa, and tried to sacrifice herself for the fourth time in two days by trying to blow the ship up with explosives. (This girl is one of the most suicidal characters in the series, and Atsushi and Kunikida are close behind her.) Going against Kunikida’s orders, Atsushi went back and saved her.

And after all of that. After Atsushi has devoted himself to trying to save this one person—to try and do whatever it takes to show her that life is worth living and there is no need to sacrifice herself when she has the agency to rely on—she goes and sacrifices herself.

And Dazai—knowing full well about Atsushi’s past, knowing full well of Atsushi’s devotion to saving Kyoka, and knowing full well that Kyoka survived—shows up and says “It was all for the best, Atsushi-kun. Kyoka-chan conquered herself and saved the city.” He looks Atsushi dead in the eye and says “It was a painful way to end it, yes. But there was a reason why it had to go this way.”

He knows that Kyoka’s alive. For the sake of amusement, or a dramatic reveal, he finds it necessary to say “lmao yeah that sure is a painful way to die. Sucks it had to end like this but y’know. It do be like that sometimes.”

Regardless of whether or not Kyoka died, playing along with it for even a second would cause lasting trauma. There’s a reason the American government is beginning to look into what laws to pass surrounding lockdown drills [for non-Americans: practice drills in case of a school shooting]. There’s a reason why the state of California is trying to ban schools playing gunfire sounds during lockdowns—the students are unaware if the drill is real or fake, and by making it appear real, it will form as the same trauma that an actual school shooter would give them. Telling those students afterwards that it was all fake doesn’t mitigate any of that.

Likewise, pretending someone is dead, even for a second, doesn’t mitigate the trauma caused by it. Atsushi will permanently have this trauma of losing Kyoka. This is not something that will easily be brushed off. 

And now that Dazai’s done traumatizing one half of the duo that defeated the guild’s leader, he has to get started on the other half. 

Akutagawa fought hard. Akutagawa could desperately use some reassurance from a certain former mentor of his—and logically, that mentor has every reason to give it. Akutagawa fulfilled what he was set up to do—he partnered with Atsushi and worked together to combine their abilities and defeat an enemy leader. 

Akuatagwa tries to present himself to Dazai as a stronger person than he was when they last spoke. Akutagawa says that he’ll show Dazai his strength. Yet Dazai’s first words are “will you now? Aren’t you at your limit?” The first words out of his mouth are a petty insult—after everything Akutagawa has done— and the only thing he get is mocked by his former mentor. 

Of course the next words out of Dazai mouth are “you’ve gotten stronger, huh?”

In flirting terms, this would be called negging. 

For those unfamiliar, negging is “an act of emotional manipulation whereby a person makes a deliberate backhanded compliment […] to another person to undermine their confidence and attempt to engender in them a need for the manipulator’s approval.” [Wikipedia, also I hate citing sources, this is not an academic paper, leave me alone]. 

Dazai first makes a backhanded comment about Akutagawa’s current (weaker) state, before giving him a halfhearted compliment on his strength. This is like saying “eh, you’ve done well this time, but could be better. I’m sure some people (like Atsushi, for example) could fight an overpowered ability user, win, and then NOTnearly pass out afterwards. Maybe if you were like that, I could give you a real compliment”

This is another move to drive Akutagawa to push himself harder (harder than he needs to. Harder than he should. [especially given his lung condition]), and to have him devote himself and his life to winning Dazai’s approval. Which, of course, he’s already doing. But it never hurts to increase your disciple’s devotion tenfold, right?

After all of that, Akutagawa does in fact pass out. For funsies, Dazai moves out of the way (we can’t be catching our formers mentees in front of our current mentee—how scandalous!), and allows Akutagawa to slam into the concrete.

If this were more medically accurate, Akutagawa may have lasting brain damage from hitting his head like that. Luckily we’re playing by manga logic here (we weren’t when Akutagawa lost his fight to Atsushi in season 1 and had a hundred broken bones, but we’re nothing if not inconsistent). So we won’t hold Dazai to such a high standard of trying to mitigate brain damage, since brain damage might not even exist in the bsd world. 

_______________________________________________

And that’s that for this week’s entry!! Join me again next week to get right back into the Kyoka content (I’m pretty sure that’ll be the main thing in next week’s chapter). Writing this one has made me think about Kyoka more than I ever had in the past and I’m pretty concerned about how self-destructive she is. This girl would take any opportunity to die.

[keithkog]

Have to desperately try to stick to my loose and self imposed 2-4 hour roleplay posting schedule for Lance today. Here we go-

(Wanted to let you guys know because it’s not that its taking me 2-4 hours to answer a question/post- It’s just something I do to limit myself because I could talk for hours straight. Hope you guys enjoy, I sure as hell will.)

-OOC

[academiawho]

heyy, first of all i wanna say that i love your blog. im preparing for neet 2024. please give me some tips on how to improve physics and chemistry. like how do you study, online, by making short notes, which study module?? like whats your timetable usually or brfore a test. thank you soo muchhh!!!!

Thank you so much!

Physics is all about concept clarity and how easily you can manipulate formulae. It takes practice so that's the easiest and most foolproof method I could recommend.

Chemistry... I myself am finding it an winding road slowly edging upwards. Organic, Physical and Inorganic Chemistry is all in-and-out NCERT. Line by line. I am not exaggerating in the slightest. Do the sums behind, the intext questions, the open-ended questions that NCERT asks, exemplar, lab manual. Literally all of it. Try mixing and matching with the PYQs to get an idea of the hot-zones and the areas that they could try making a question from this year.

I used to study from youtube and took digital coaching in my first year. Don't know how much that helped. But it did increase my screen time.

I made short notes after I was done with a particular chapter, so that I knew where the questions were made from and how they could be formed. Some years are v imp while others might not seem, some may be derived etc. They're not aesthetic or neat but I think that's ok.

Before a test, I go through the chapters, usually sticking to NCERT and my notes because it's familiar territory. My timetable is pretty flexible but that's because of my adhd, I don't think I can be productive with a self-imposed rigid schedule. Everyone works differently and the process to cracking a way that works for you is trial and error.

Wishing you all the best for your attempt! Keep studying and practicing💛

[aheathen-conceivably]

Me today and literally all weekend as I count down the minutes until Monday since I’m trying to be a responsible adult and stick to my own self-imposed story posting schedule 😩

[ink-flavored]

Slow-Down Announcement

Hey everyone! Thank you so much for your patience during my break, my move, and through the holidays. It means a lot that you’d all be so generous as to keep paying me while you wait. In general, your continued support is incredibly important to me. And as much as I appreciate it, I will have to ask you for a bit more patience.

Ko-Fi was an experiment I started to see if it was practical for me. I was excited about the response my AUgust 2022 prompts had gotten, and I wanted to see how my audience would respond to access to more of my writing and more of my process. I was also curious to see if I could use Ko-Fi to grow my audience, or supplement my writing career. Building a brand online is difficult, but I couldn’t let an opportunity like this slip by me.

After about 15 months, I can say I’ve had a lot of fun on Ko-Fi. I love Magnet Mondays, I like sharing what happens behind-the-scenes, and giving you all sneak peaks of what’s to come. Like I said, I’m forever grateful you thought my art to be worth paying monthly for in the first place, it’s not something I ever dreamed people would do for me. Unfortunately, posting on Ko-Fi as regularly as I wanted has become impractical for my schedule and mental health.

Keeping up with the rate of posting I promised—weekly, biweekly, and monthly, over my various categories—isn’t sustainable in my current environment. If I had the opportunity to do nothing but write for 8-hours a day, 5-days a week, it would be easy! I would have plenty of time to share my writing with you, continue my personal projects, and maintain a healthy work-life balance. Sadly, my writing schedule is not so generous. My full-time office job cuts into my creative time a lot, and stacking the self-imposed obligations of my Ko-Fi schedule on top of that means that I’m “at work” a lot more than I otherwise would be.

Long story short, I’m getting fatigued trying to keep pace with Ko-Fi updates. I’m going to be slowing down my activity here, and prioritize what I can do without burning myself out. I have a flexible plan that I’ve been developing, so you know where you can find me outside of Ko-Fi if you’d still like to follow my work elsewhere.

Keep Reading below here or on Ko-Fi

First, Magnet Mondays are sticking around, but this time for free. Polls are easier than counting comments, so I’ll be hosting the weekly vote and the poems on my ink-flavored Tumblr account. I really don’t want to give up doing Magnet Mondays, since it was a lot of fun for me (and for you all too, I hope). The first poll will go up this Sunday (January 7th) and the first poem will go up the next Monday (January 15th), so I hope I’ll see you all on Tumblr! I’ll still post the final poems here on Ko-Fi for organization's sake.

Second, one of my goals for 2024 is to be more active on my new Neocities website. The freedom of having my own writing website where I can post whatever I want without the need to be overly professional like a portfolio, and no risk of getting my content reported like on social media, means that I can share a lot more of what I write. Please do check it out, and feel free to sign the guestbook while you’re there!

More generally, I want to migrate some of the Typewriter-tier behind-the-scenes posts to Tumblr and Neocities, so more people can see what goes on under the hood when I write. I don’t have imminent plans to share the exclusive content on Saturdays anywhere else—save for things like AUgust, which are already all free—but I won’t write it off.

Finally, as for the fate of this Ko-Fi account, I’ll be reworking the tiers a bit. Magnet Mondays will be free, so it can’t be a perk, and my plan is to post behind-the-scenes or exclusives sporadically, whenever I feel like I have something to share. I’ll keep the BTS to Wednesdays and the exclusives to Saturdays, but that will be the only consistency in scheduling. Nothing from the Manuscript tier needs to change, since I don’t plan on halting commissions.

Thank you all for being so understanding, and for being so generous this past year and a bit. I’m happy I even had the opportunity to try this out, and it would have been over before it started if I didn’t have people like you.

[604to647]

WIP Wednesday (bonus edition) and some Safest with You Housekeeping

Thank you for the tag @nerdieforpedro - excited for all the goodies you’re cooking up! 🧑‍🍳

A little Safest with You update! I'm going to be taking a mini-break from posting until ~April! With spring break/vacation coming up, my schedule will be a bit more unpredictable and I would like to be able to write and catch-up on some chapters without a (self imposed!) schedule of posting (I’ve been try to stick to a once a week/every two weeks schedule, as a means of motivation). As well, the tone of some of the upcoming chapters is a little different than what we've seen so far, so I kind of also need to wrap my mind around it/get in that headspace (I will admit to a bit of a blockage on this front 😂).

Plus - I need to finish the Modern AU Pero Tovar mini series (Mi Galleta) which I also want to start posting in April.

So not a hiatus! Still writing, just holding off on posting for a bit - I hope you'll wait for me 🥰😘 If you're interested, below the cut are snippets of a whole bunch of WIPs:

Safest with You (Modern AU, Retired Mob Enforcer!Din Djarin)

Chapter 16 (The Match-up): It seems like unretiring is all the rage these days.  First, with the amount of time Din’s been spending with the Mandos to help quell the recent unrest, you basically consider him to have unofficially gone back part-time. And now this.  An unsanctioned boxing match.  You could kill Poe.

Chapter 18 (The Threat): His eyes are closed, breathing even, but barely controlled.  On more than one occasion, Din has marveled at your talent for being able to soothe and calm him; often with a single touch.  But not tonight.  Tonight, no matter how you may try, his muscles will not relax, his fists will not unclench, and the tension he carries in his shoulders will not dissipate.

Mi Galleta (Modern AU, Grumpy Bouncer!Pero Tovar)

Part 1: Ginger Molasses: Pero almost wishes he hadn’t looked up, so instantly disarmed by the innocent look you’re giving him.  For a moment, he imagines what you might look like giving him this same look from between his legs while on your knees, before he forces himself to snap out of his daydream with something close to a groan.  To cover up this noise, he gives a curt nod to your question.

And then, although you couldn’t possibly be reading his filthy mind, you say, “May I come… back?” and Pero almost perishes when he hears the first three words of your question.  He once again gives you a brusque tip of his head so not to betray any of his thoughts. 

Untitled Friends-to-Lovers (Extreme Sports AU, Young!Frankie Morales)

Frankie still comes for drinks every Friday, just to see you.  Just to hear your voice and the melodic cadence of your speech when you tell a funny story about work that week.  Just to take in your soft ‘thank you’ when he offers to buy the next round.  Just to see your eyes crinkle when you laugh at something Gabe says.  Just to be near you.

But mainly Frankie continues to come to feel the gentle scrape of your nails against his scalp when you tousle his, Mark and Gabe’s hair successively in greeting when you arrive.  He purposefully makes sure he gets to McKibbon’s before you do to ensure he doesn’t miss it.  Lately, more often than not, you tend to leave Friday drinks early. On these nights, even though Frankie is deprived of your company, he relishes in that second touch from you when you run your hands through his hair and rub his head, your customary goodbye.  He lives for these touches.

If this is all he can have of you, he’ll take it.

[magpies-gold]

I may have finally unlocked the thing what turns my unhealthy overproductive causes-me-burnout creativity into enjoyable creativity - and it's called working off of vibes.

In the past I've tried just taking breaks from being creative, but that never works. Doing things other than being creative just feels like I've put myself in time out from the thing I actually like doing. Ultimately, I want to be creative. I love making art! I love writing stories! I genuinely get life from being my artistic self like.... all the heckin' time. It's all I genuinely want to do is make stuff. What I don't get life from is making it a grind. Working to rigid schedules, focusing on daily goals and - oh my lord, I despise the push to monetize it. I'm leaning hard away from that these days, and I'm not sure how far I'll ultimately take my aversion to pursuing profit from my creative ventures. It doesn't make me significantly happier to make money off of it (even though sometimes it's necessary, like when disaster strikes and I don't readily have four digits in the bank account to fix whatever's exploded), especially when making money comes with added stress from things like figuring out the taxes on what I've made, and the horrors of the perpetual chase to make more money. The emotional balance trends towards the negative and I'm over it. So I'm attempting a vibes-based approach - doing things when it's good for me to, and in a way that is fun. Some of it's a bit of concerted de-programming: for example, my webcomic is a source of truly bad habits for no good reason. It exists only on my Patreon, and it is exceptionally obscure and always was. There is very little point in wearing myself out trying to pour twenty hours a week into a new page every single week just because one is supposed to stick to a schedule, but over the last decade or so I programmed myself very well to do just that. Getting out of that rut so that I can have a healthy relationship with it again is a fight, but I'm winning. I want to chase the short term happy of getting a new page queued up every Monday, but instead I'm refusing to do so. If the page is done, I queue it up a few days late. And then the next week a few days later than that. Always a different number of days, pushing it out of sync so that I can't fall back into routine and neither can my handful of readers. I did not ever promise them a schedule. A schedule is bad for me. Result? I (mostly) drew three pages this weekend and enjoyed it. They're not done, but I made a heck of a dent and didn't feel gross about it. I'll finish them over the course of the next week or so, in bits and pieces rather than forcing myself to sit still for hours at a time until the page is done. I should be stopping when I'm done. I'm also way happier with the art I'm making. I'm still churning it out quick, but the lack of self-imposed deadlines means that I can have fun with it. I'm doing similar things with my writing. It's nice when I can keep Alpha Base moving forward, but for the last while I've been muddling around in different directions than forward and it's actually getting the creative wheels spinning in my head better than the methodical one-step-in-front-of-the-other approach. If I have a hankering to jump elsewhere in the plot and write a scene, I do. If I need to explore an aspect of a character that technically falls into a prequel (because dang it, I'm starting to develop prequel material) then I go for that. If writing a drabble that might not even land in the book, or any of the book(s), is what I need, then I'm doing that, and it doesn't matter if I'm "ready" to or "there yet" - I'm just doing it. Vibes. It's all worthwhile.  Hell, I spent most of the weekend writing a purely fluff scene (me! writing fluff!) between two of my antagonists and I think that was one of the best ways to spend a weekend. I feel damn good about it and learned a ton about them both. I think I even know where in the book to put it, and I sure didn't when I started writing. Didn't know that would happen! Life's too short to spend turning everything into a dang job.  I just want to play. So to hell with it. We play.

[skitskatdacat63]

misc lore drop day 33/?

Going to be doing something a little different for the next couple posts!! I reblogged this ask game because when I saw it, I could only think of answers from Boy King AU. So I thought it’d be fun to be prompted and force myself to think inside the confines of these questions. Please send more if you are interested!! Tysm Csilla for the first three!!! I’ll answer one per day, because I like sticking to this self imposed schedule :D No one was specified so I’ll answer this for both Seb and Fernando!

What is a trait your OC hides about themself from others? Do they refuse to acknowledge it or begrudgingly accept it?

Fernando

I’ve talked about this before, but he definitely hides his passion. It’s like pulling teeth, in the beginning, to get him to admit he genuinely likes or enjoys anything. Especially any of his fondness for Seb, he will absolutely never admit it. He’s actually a pretty fun-loving guy, but he believes he needs to be stoic to survive and succeed in the world. He must only focus on doing his duty, plotting and scheming, to move up in the world. He used to be very carefree and whimsical, but that got him nowhere, and he believes if he stayed that way, he’d still be a prince. When in reality, his passion dissipated when he got closer to being a king. Not because that’s what kings should be like, but because the proceedings around it were practically designed to undermine him. But, he still got what he wanted. So he believes that is how he got where he is, instead of it in reality being a symptom of where he is, if that makes sense? 

He definitely evolves throughout his life to become more like his younger self. Those around him, especially Seb of course, chip away at that impassive facade over time. But in the beginning, he;s definitely the type to deny it to his grave. “A king has no time for silly games such as these, I must focus on my duty” etc etc. He can’t accept it because he feels like everything will crumble away from him if he does. Becoming dispassionate is just a sign of growing older, okay? He says. It’s more of a part of himself that he’s intentionally hiding/shoving away, than one he needs to accept. Though maybe he needs to accept it’s not normal nor healthy to hide your true self and desires behind 10 masks of indifference and seriousness. 

Seb is a bit harder because I think he’s a much more straightforward, carefree guy than Fernando is. I’ve talked about this as well, but it’s definitely insecurity. He, as someone who has been king and a destined emperor since as long as he can remember, does not have experience not getting what he wants. He expects everything to come his way, and everyone to bow to him and prioritize him overall. Yes, that’s kind of selfish BUT, can you really blame someone who’s been raised with the idea that he is the most important being? That’s not what he’s insecure over, but rather suddenly dealing with the idea that he can’t instantly get everything his way, i.e. his relationship with Fernando. It’s very tough for him to suddenly face that, someone that outwardly doesn’t like him nor thinks he’s the greatest to ever exist. It fuels him to try to win Fernando over, but it also causes his worldview to start collapsing. Thus: insecurity. Insecurity over: is anyone actually telling me the truth, does anyone even like me, etc???? Also specifically in regards to his and Fernando’s marriage. At the beginning, he’s like well of course Fernando would love this and love me, because I am me, how could he not!? But later on when he starts to get insecure, it makes him question everything. Wait so he doesn’t actually like me, he wasn't in awe of getting to marry me?

It’s definitely something he really struggles to come to terms with. He’s not supposed to be feeling these emotions. He shouldn’t be having to question his whole life up until this point. It’s something that he keeps to himself, because it would probably ruin him if anyone else knew. He’s supposed to be the epitome of self confidence, of ardent self belief. So why is he suddenly getting all squirmy over everything? 

[wolfehunt]

i had an awful month last month and i’m gonna try and move past that, but i feel a bit sad on the dash lately. i’m still planning on sticking to my self-imposed schedule and i have things half written in my drafts, but idk how present i’ll be outside of that for a little while.

[drinkurkombucha]

Kombu I am sooooooo excited for your next update. Tysm for all you dooo 💜💜

Thanks anon, I am buzzing to share it with you! Currently trying to squeeze rewriting/editing time into my schedule so I can stick to my self-imposed Friday update deadline.

[cisthehuman]

The Future of Streaming~

It's not a goodbye! It's a 'See You When I See You' type of deal.

Trigger Warnings: Family Tragedy, Self Harm, Suicidal Thoughts (while I don't go into great detail about these thing, they are mentioned)

To explain myself and how I've been feeling, we should talk about why I started streaming in the first place.

I've said it a few times on stream, and possibly on here in a post, but I started streaming a few months after my dad suddenly passed. At that time, I was thinking 'Oh shit, we really don't have long to live. I need to do stuff I've been wanting to do before I kick the bucket too!'. At the same time, I've withdrawn from my friends a bit at the time, and I wanted streaming to be a thing to show them I'm okay and hanging in there.

And not everyone will understand the pain and energy it takes to grieve. It's been three years now and it still sucks ass, but it was even worse during those first few months when the wounds were very fresh. I don't even remember those months now as it's blocked it out of my memory. On top of navigating this new normal without my father, I went to graduate school which required even more energy and time. And to make matters even more confusing I was beginning to experience my first symptoms of PCOS which made my mental and physical health even worse.

I'm unfortunately not a stranger to poor mental health. I've considered cutting my time on this planet short enough times to know that I have to take extreme care of myself to be strong enough to fight off these thoughts. The stress of taking up some of my father's responsibilities, dealing with loss, school (which then turned into work stress when I got employed), and the ups and downs of chronic illness made me very weak to find happiness and enjoy my hobbies.

Now, don't get me wrong--streaming positively affected me during this time. I was able to do some streams with my irl friends, meet new people, and experience new stories/games that I never considered playing. The highlights was playing Our Life. The small group that amassed during that time was very fun. It made me feel lighter and brighter! And in the future when the sequel comes out, you bet your bottom dollar I'll be streaming it!

Tangent aside, while streaming was fun and did give me something new to do, I became a bit too ambitious with it. That is all on me. I started trying to make this into my third job and the two that I have take up a lot of my time. I started to bite off a bit too much than I could chew. I wanted to make a big overarching story for my streams and make all of these cool things for it...and with my limited energy I usually missed my self imposed deadlines which would make me very upset and feel even worse for myself. On top of that my lovely (but fairly cheap) set up would sometimes make streaming impossible, which added unnecessary pressure. I would think the small viewership I had would forget me, I could never get this to take off, all of this was for nothing.

That was when I realized I lost sight of what I was doing with streaming. I forgot that my original goal was just to sit around and have fun, whether no one or several people showed up. It was something I wanted to do to just relax. Instead I turned it into something I avoided.

I needed to take a step back. I took a small vacation from my job and truly sat around and did nothing. It was the first time in the last three years that I just enjoyed being alive. It was a sobering experience for me as I realized that I also haven't fully processed all of my grief and traumas. Resting also helped me get more energy to feel more present with people I care about and be more mindful of what I was doing healthwise.

This brings us to now! Streaming is going on an indefinite hiatus. There may be times where I randomly have one, but I won't stick to a particular schedule. I need more time to myself to get to a place where I'm mentally and physically able to bring streaming in as a bigger piece of my life. I've been in this place mentally before, and instead of giving myself time, I ruined things for myself and wasn't the best person to other people. That's a scar I'll keep, but I'd like to be better this time around!

So yeah! If you made it through this half planned/half stream of consciousness, thank you! Like I said, it's not a I'm completely gone type of thing. I just need to rest properly. I like putting my whole self into things, and I just don't have enough 'me' to put into this sadly. But don't worry! I'll still pop up with things! I'll still make posts on here as well!

One day, CisLunar will be back and ready to roll!

[lindaghill]

JusJoJan24 the 1st - In Training

This post is part of Just Jot it January. To join in, click here to get to the prompt and drop your link. I’ve been in self-imposed training for a while. It’s not as athletic as it sounds, though I wish it could be. I mean, I do try to walk every day. But mostly, I’m constantly trying to train my brain to stick to a schedule. I write everything down. My hours of every day are (mostly)…

[pwhiteheadarts102-03]

All long journeys begin with a first step. As I begin this blog, I respectfully remind myself of a few of my own ‘self-imposed’ Tumbler rules:

Don’t be a blog-hog

No cursing or inappropriate verbiage

Be mindful of reflections in pictures

Follow instructions to the best of my ability

Pablo Picasso said ‘Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.’ You can absolutely expect me to break my own rules here, and probably some rules of the school and general humanity. So here we go -

My first response to this assignment - a semester long blog - is that it might be pretty cool to see a process in action, a record of growth and improvement. My second response was “What a pain in the a** it’s going to be to create a record of my growth on demand (ie. according to schedule).” Whatever.

Anyway, I’m kind of excited to be in the presence of some incredibly talented artists and students. Hopefully some of that will stick with me as we collectively work towards improvement and growth. As I said in class, I REALLY appreciated the anonymity of looking at the art that was submitted and not having the benefit (or liability) of knowing the creator.

Working with text in Photoshop wasn’t a dreadful chore for me, in fact, I like it better than working in Illustrator. I don’t know Illustrator well at all. I would like to be better at it because, as I heard a couple of times in class, paraphrased, I have ideas that I can’t translate to the computer. Perhaps having an extra tool like Illustrator would allow me to broaden my expression.

I REALLY liked the more realistic images presented in class, especially ‘See me in all my colors’ and ‘BeAuty lies deep beneath the surface’. Killer! (Included below for clarification) As far as realism in art goes, it fits in well with my marketing mentality. It’s no secret that I have a commercial bent, and I appreciate art in marketing as well as in museums. The human form in art is much more enticing than a cup of coffee, but for me, I’ve been going through a phase of deep colors - chocolates, off-whites and eggshells to name a few - and of course I do appreciate a good cup of coffee.

Off topic - if you’d like to try the best Turkish coffee in Columbia, it’s right off campus up Devine st. at The Mediterranean Tea Room. Great Med food and a relaxed atmosphere off hours. Not as cozy when they’re busy.

After re-reading the instructions, apparently I’m not supposed to get on here and gab away. I’m supposed to respond to reading pages 16-77 in my red book, so…

It’s a hard read for me, I don’t like reading interviews necessarily, but these were interesting and insightful. It reminds me of reading ‘Ad Age’. Or Playboy. Playboy always has interviews. And just like this book, the photos around it had more appeal than the reading - but required reading is required reading.

My favorite designer in the book had a firm called ‘Kiss Me I’m Polish’. That doesn’t really fit the norm, but what is norm anyway? A lot of these companies have (had) funky names, probably a byproduct of the artsy set. I looked a few up. It sure makes it easy to remember. The two things I related to most were that she was willing to work long days and nights, and it didn’t really seem to affect her. I know that that’s a reality as a commercial designer. She also stated that she felt that most of her clients didn’t really know what they wanted. How true. She recommended listening to them and letting them arrive at what they want. I have experienced this commercially and found that one or two hours of communication (the listening kind - with gentle prodding of course) saves DAYS of creation and proofing.

So, these past two weeks have been critiques with friends, AI assisted design, Photoshop editing (and purchase dammit), and reading interviews from designers and agency owners. Overall, not a bad way to get the feet wet.

I can only hope that the next weeks, months and years will be as exciting and rewarding.

Oh yeah, and we did this thing:

[driving-hazard]

Svetlana's Brainbow

I've been stuck in my room for longer periods than this, but for some reason this time it's hard not to wanna get up and leave. If it isn't a sort of self-imposed reverse psychology, I reckon it's just nerves. If I'm going to finish the imaging process though, I'll have to stick around for another 49 hours, otherwise I'll interrupt the process and have to start all over. Spinning around in my chair, I try to feel the little creatures in my body as they do their work, little bacteriophage-sized gadgets lodged in the soma and latched to the dendrites of my brain cells and nervous system, constantly electrically poking and prodding them and watching the way their parts react, listening to the signals they hear from their friends upstream. If they do what they're supposed to, in roughly 2 days I'll have an exact copy, give or take a little graininess, of myself inside my computer.

What I'll do with it of course, is a bit of an open secret. Even though the practice of copying is relatively rare, owing to its seeming pointlessness; you could immerse yourself fully in a computer with VR after all, why go through the trouble? It's still met with uncomfortable pauses in conversation, as if you'd just told someone you had a hobby of breaking your own fingers. Of course, that doesn't matter to me. Despite our subcellular integration with computers and machines nowadays, some of us feel an indescribable, inexplicable urge to shed off the rest of it, to be something entirely of our own creation, rather than just partially. Something like that probably sounds utterly psychotic to anyone outside our circles, but no matter who I have to try and talk me out of it, at the end of the day my only second opinion is my own.

Scribbled on a text document in the pile of files littering my desktop is something that passes for a schedule, for both me and my copy. If we were doing anything even resembling science, we would have had a list of experiments, although if you asked me what we'd experiment on I'd come up with a blank, evidenced by the sparseness of the schedule. What it really is for is communication, a way to keep track of when to check up on each other, so that we can relay our experiences informally. That's what my curiosity really boils down to. I want to know what it's like *for me* to live in a computer permanently, what it's like to wake up the morning after being copied, the week after, the month. What the finality of it feels like. Only I can describe that to myself in terms I'd understand.

Why is there a schedule? The brain's compressed state structure might take up only a few petabytes of space, but the execution of a simulated brain takes up a gargantuan amount of processing power, and even worse, you've got to add the resources needed to simulate a body that stretches and squishes and dilates and perspirates and twitches and flexes in a million involuntary, unconscious ways, and an environment that not only will convince your senses of it's reality, but also not simply bore you death. No one like me can afford to have a server in some datacenter at our beck and call for such things, and so we turn to the one option we have, slowdown.

If you run a really big simulation extremely slowly, normally you're just trying to optimize for low resource usage. Slowing down a copy though, has two additional considerations: communication with the outside world, and more importantly to them, communication with each other. If you're stuck anywhere alone, even a spectacularly interesting place, you're going to go fucking insane, so copies need to be running at the same speed so that they can interact with each other. But that speed also cannot be slow enough that you can't communicate with them in a reasonable time frame, otherwise a problem could occur on either end and you'd have no way to notify each other to have it worked out. That trade-off led to the standard for slowdown: 1/30th real-time. Slow enough to be run, fast enough to communicate with.

My computer can easily handle the resources needed to run at this speed, and nothing my copy can get up to in there is going to scratch the space on my drive. Our only concern for now is keeping in touch.

I'm going to sleep for now. I reckon if i can nap my way through most of this, the process won't be too agonizing, even if I'll still be exhausted from sheer lack of activity. The little gadgets in my head sadly can't artificially jolt my muscles, but they can at least artificially put me to sleep while they're doing the imaging.