Two-Year Anniversary

This installment of the blog will drop a few days after March 28, 2020 - the two-year anniversary of TAPAS. While the first TAPAS project was released on the YouTube channel on November 14, 2018, I consider the founding of the group to have happened eight months earlier. With your permission, I'd like to tell you the story of how TAPAS was founded.

So, it was two years ago... in March... we founded TAPAS.

Okay, with that out of the way, let's look at what TAPAS has accomplished in two years. ...Well, from where I'm standing, it appears to be jack squat. Just a few video series, that update on an absurdly irregular basis, that absolutely no one watches. It's entirely my fault, of course. How can I wish to make it as some sort of creator when I can barely function as a human being?

It's fine... I'm fine... we're getting somewhere. I always knew I could never do this by myself, and it seems like I'm finally surrounding myself with people I can rely on. Same people I was surrounded with for those first two years, but, you know, nobody's perfect, I feel very lucky that so many people got the opportunity to start working all at once. ...That was before the coronavirus situation came to light, incidentally.

Let's take a look at the tasks that were set for the month of March. Pages 2 and 3 of the Deities Project, those got done. Real pretty. Here, I'll pack the project as it stands so far here onto the blog:

Lots and lots of deities, but the project isn't even halfway over yet. Doesn't serve any particular purpose, but it's super-fun. So, everything else that was on the agenda for March, let's take a look:

Keys & Kingdoms, the storyboards and preparing for the rest of the season, and auditioning roles... struggling. Writing Luno Canyon... struggling. Recreating Whirlwind... struggling. Planning out Kingdom Butts, let's see, yep, struggling. And rewriting the Some Sweet Kind of Vampire pilot, struggling with that as well, it's all a struggle, that's all I ever do. I struggle to keep my head on straight at work without completely breaking apart, and I struggle to have so much as a movement or thought when I'm away from work. Things I need to do are easy, people are depending on me to do that. Things I want to do are nearly impossible.

It was unfair of me to say that no one watches the YouTube channel. Team Salmon watch it. The fact that the channel is watched by people I love rather than hordes of strangers, well, I probably shouldn't feel bitter about that. I should probably be grateful, wouldn't you say? Yeah. Gotta change my attitude.

And here's Team Salmon as they'd appear in the RWBY universe, drawn by Stacy with varying degrees of input from the rest of us. We debated using our real names and theming the characters' looks after the meanings of our first and last names -- that would have given a nice "Easter and Christmas" theme based on the meanings of Stacy and Naty's names -- but in the end we decided on option B: following RWBY's color-themed naming rule, with our real initials so we can still be Team SSMN. This was a fun little side project. Could have used my real first name, but there's already a RWBY character with the first name Sage (and another with the surname Mann, weirdly enough) so I wanted to mix it up.

Back to Work

Since we got Team Salmon back together to discuss casting, well, there haven't been any auditions to talk about yet, but we have been discussing what Team SSMN would actually look like in the RWBY universe, and that's been fun. I'll have Stacy draw it next time she has some free time from the Deities Project. Decided to only do one page of that a month to give Stacy time to devote herself to other projects.

Still struggling to get to my usual podcast tasks. I wonder if it'll ever be easy again? Well, while I'm here, might as well show off the casting calls for posterity:

Gone back to work; Charlie's is the only name in town right now as a place to dine, since you stay in your own car, so it's safe for us to stay open. Only three days in, they're already working me to the bone, these endless customers. My poor feet and knees... but, lots of hours, lots of tips, it's all very good for the ol' wallet, prime for the move to Quincy, if that can still happen in the midst of the pandemic...

Had a sleepless night recently, remembering Quigley Community Theatre, a series I wanted to animate using The Sims 2, as a combination of stories about a theatre troupe I told with that game over a decade ago, and my own more recent community theatre experiences. I can't imagine ever having time for creating such a thing, but I spent a day preparing for it just in case... downloaded an abandonware copy of The Sims 2 and made sure it runs correctly. I'll see where I am in a few months and if there's actually a chance at Quigley being a thing that can happen.

So, basically, much too busy at work this week for much creative progress, I'm shooting for getting the podcast out next week, as my hours aren't quite so constant from here on out. Got two Choices auditions... from members of the casting department, but hey, they're valid, they deserve a fighting chance at playing the characters they inspired. Really wish my sisters had auditioned by now, but... I guess it can wait for another week, I'm keeping the auditions open until next month.

Casting Keys & Kingdoms

I impulsively created a bunch of casting calls for the characters of Keys & Kingdoms: The Choices. Did that instead of my assigned task, which was The Little Mermaid Retrospective #3... fortunately, the retrospective got done the following day. Anyway, I figured, hey, nice to have these casting calls, I'll put them out next month...

Nah, I'll put them out this weekend. No patience in me. Probably for the best I decided this series shouldn't be for-real animated; in addition to not having the budget for real animation, I certainly don't have the patience either.

So, yeah, that's what's going to happen -- this weekend, I'll open the auditions via a Facebook event, inviting all the actresses I know and telling them to invite every actress in Quincy. Then hopefully everyone who's interested will send videos of themselves doing the monologues and doing some singing, and then a month from now Team Salmon will deliberate on who will be the voices of the Choices!

Team Salmon consists of, well, everyone from my social inner circle, the people I started hanging out with in late 2013 to talk about Cars and My Little Pony, but the main branch of Team Salmon, the ones who'll be doing the casting, are the four founders of TAPAS: myself, Kenzie, Naty, and Stacy. It all began when I first asked Stacy to join in the projects, adding her highly-developed artistic talent to the writing and light drawing that myself, Kenzie, and Naty were getting up to, and I realized we could be, well... this bears a bit more explanation.

In the western-made anime RWBY, every team of Huntsmen has a four-letter name, consisting of the members' initials, that spells out a word evocative of a color. Sage, Stacy, McKenzie, Nathalie -- SSMN, or Salmon. That's a color! So we're Team Salmon. While I'm giving away the secrets of where my company's weird names come from, keep this under your hats, but TAPAS stands for "Totally Awesome Productions And Stuff" -- which, yes, makes the full name "TAPAS and Stuff Productions" quite redundant.

So, that's where we are as of the late Tuesday night on which I'm writing this -- Choices auditions begin this weekend and will have begun by the time I publish this post. Figure that's a thing I'll do, write the blog all week and then post it on Monday.

As far as doing plays... in addition to TAPAS projects, I want to take part in the local community theatre, both the official Quincy Community Theatre and the local indie troupe, Square Peg. Of course, the sort of gatherings where one puts on live stage performances aren't exactly in vogue right now on account of the coronavirus... but I won't give up on the arts if the arts won't give up on me, and at least so far, the arts seem determined to... still be a thing. God willing, this virus situation will have blown over by the time I hit Quincy in June... I do hope so.

Okay, I opened the auditions a few days ago, it is now Sunday... turns out, when trying to reach out to people to audition for an all-female cast, I know like five people who definitely perform and three people who, like, might. Buuut, one of those people just invited an additional 50 people to the event, so... that's some pretty good numbers. That's awesome.

I also opened auditions on BTVA - that's behindthevoiceactors.com, it's mostly about cataloguing pro voice actors but it also has a new little feature where one can cast one's own voice-over projects. I figure I'll get the voice for the scratch track there -- just so that I'm not the guy you have to listen to through the story reel (I am a voice actor, but what I'm not is eight women) -- and then record the final version locally.

And it's already Monday... really crept up on me, as I've been doing nothing but sit here and wait for somebody to audition. Been up all week and I haven't gotten one... Guess I'd better try to catch up on the podcast so it can be released tomorrow like it's supposed to... it's a gloomy time in the world today.

First Week Back

I've been trying to be active everywhere, starting last week when I rediscovered this blog. It's been incredibly difficult. My executive dysfunction is as powerful as ever, but my depression is all but gone, so... I still can't do anything, but now I don't feel bad about it. Not the ideal state to be in. My laundry remains ever undone, my space unclean, my projects unfulfilled. But I'm working on it, trying to get things done...

I've been thinking back, largely due to Facebook bringing up the memories, to five years ago, when I was in Quincy Community Theatre's production of Spamalot. One could say that was the moment TAPAS was born, as shortly afterward I began writing a musical and imagining people I was in Spamalot with as its cast members. After a few years of work and study that didn't really go anywhere, I went back to Quincy, acted in two other shows, and managed to sort of start a single TAPAS project in the form of the Icewind Dale LP... drifted off again after that, hoping the third time is the charm, this time to return to Quincy and start TAPAS for realsies.

Spamalot photo shoot. Standing: Bill Stalder as King Arthur, Sage Mann (me!!!) as Sir Robin, Michael Gash as Sir Lancelot, David Samuels as Sir Galahad. Sitting: Drew Quintero as Patsy, Dick Rees as Sir Bedevere.

Promotional image from Is He Dead?, my third and most recent theatrical appearance. Sidney Shackleton as O'Shaughnessy, Aaron Joseph Schmitt as Dutchy, myself as Chicago, Luke Lawson as Jean-Francois Millet.

I still talk to most of my co-stars; Drew, Michael, Sidney, and Aaron provided voice work for the one TAPAS project I successfully began, recorded in Aaron's homemade sound booth, along with a few other contacts from the three shows I've done down there. Didn't get as many people involved as I would have liked! But I'm proud of the Irregular Webcomic soundsets and the voiced conversations I edited together into the first four episodes.

In the past week, I've made the decision that I simply can't catch up on the podcast. Last year, my depression eventually rendered me completely unable to make my weekly updates - there were absolutely no podcast updates from early July to early October. So ever since then I've been operating under the assumption that if I do multiple episodes a week, eventually I'll be able to catch up, get back to the point where the number of episodes equals the number of weeks I've been doing the podcast, but... as of this week, I've accepted that I just can't do it. So, I'm back to shooting for one a week. ...Even that isn't going well. But I'm shooting.

First project I'm going to tackle when I head back to Quincy is Better Yet?, a play co-written by my friend Mason Ellison, I believe he's going to direct it as well. We're in talks with QCT for using their rehearsal space to mount our production. I'm going to star. I was surprised when Mason told me he wanted me to play the lead, as I'd pictured him in the role when I read the script. Eager to sink my teeth into the character. It's the story of a guy who's bouncing back from a suicide attempt and using that as an excuse to treat everybody like crap, and he has to learn that, you know, you can't do that.

Also this week, got a nice gift from YouTube personalities Rob Thomas and Raven Fox. Last year, I donated a whole buncha money to their crowdfunded vacation, winning me the chance to have lunch with them over Skype. We've touched base a time or two since then, and, when Rob revamped his Patreon a bit, I upped my pledge, earning me a Twitter shout-out from the pair of them. When that happened, I decided to revamp the TAPAS website so that it included teases of nearly all the projects I talked about in last week's blog post. Ultimately, their shout-out added up to six hits to the website and one new Twitter follower, Raven herself. But hey, Raven paying attention to what I have to say on Twitter is certainly a nice reward.

So, gosh, I guess this has been a pretty big week for TAPAS, now that I lay it all out. I was feeling down about not getting much done.

Doggo! Dear old boy Sebastian. This weekend my mom asked me if I'd like to have him once I move down to Quincy. I sure hope I can. It would be an honor, taking in the old family dog in his twilight years, being the guy to keep him healthy and happy to the end, make some memories with him in the first home that's all my own.

Got some tips from my friend Grace about moving to Quincy, seems it'll be a mite more complicated than I imagined it to be... I'll make it work. I'm gonna go down there and start TAPAS for real. Five years I've been working toward this goal... bit pathetic that a goal as simple as moving to a new city so I can do theatre junk has taken me five years. But hey, today I unpacked the suitcase that I brought home two months ago. Not on my own. My aunt had to barge in and tell me to clean up the piles of mess in my space... can't do a thing for myself. I can only do things for other people. That's why I hope someday people expect me to create content and entertainment.

So, that's this week... an unusually active week for TAPAS, but I hope that changes soon. As of last night, I'm working with Naty on writing Luno Canyon and with Kenzie on storyboarding The Choices... or rather, they're working on those things and I'm waiting for them to finish so I can provide my directorial input. That's just the way they wanted it. Gives me more time for all my other junk, lots of that, time to get to that on this fine Monday morning.

March 2020 Update

I had forgotten there was a TAPAS blog. I was just looking back through the private TAPAS Facebook group to figure out when the anniversary was -- it's March 28, so, coming up on two years soon -- and happened to come upon a post in which I shared the blog, a blog which hasn't updated in seventeen months.

A lot has changed in seventeen months, based on the details I shared in September 2018. Since I'm here, might as well share an update on how all the projects stand now.

I moved away from Quincy in early 2019, finding myself psychologically unable to, well, do anything. I spent 2019 living with my aunt and working at her restaurant with the intent of returning to Quincy at the end of the season, but then my therapist said he wanted me to stick with him for another six months, so I'm doing that. It's working, I'm for sure getting better; so, I'll be returning to Quincy in June and I hope to get a job there and tackle a whole bunch of TAPAS projects.

~

https://tapasandstuff.com/ We have a website now, courtesy of WordPress. The website has quite a bit of information on it, but I might as well elaborate on it here, especially since I'll be updating the website often, so let's see how everything stands as of right now, second of March 2020.

TAPAS and Stuff Productions Podcast

Ah, possibly the reason I stopped updating the blog -- I started working on the podcast. The podcast, in addition to having had a few months-long hiatuses caused by my depression, stopped being about TAPAS news a long time ago, as there came a point when I just plain stopped having news to share, as there were no project updates to speak of. I hope that's changed and I can start adding a TAPAS updates segment back into it starting in Season 2 -- Season 2 of the podcast will begin with Episode 53, I'm currently working on Episode 43 and trying real hard to release two episodes a week in order to catch up on all the delays. Season 2 will also debut an upgraded version of the TAPAS logo, so enjoy the one Naty designed while it lasts.

As noted on the website, Season 1 of the podcast consists of five distinct segments: Companions, in which I described every scene from Drizzt and the Companions of the Dance Hall, then gave a few updates, then... there stopped being any updates to talk about, so that segment only lasted for the first half of the season. Then there was the Team Salmon segment, in which I talked about the seven original ideas described in the September 2018 section of the blog. As with Companions, I ran out of things to talk about around the halfway point of the season... there just wasn't any progress going on.

Then there was the Droon segment, in which I read books from the 44-volume children's series The Secrets of Droon and dream about how I'd adapt the series to television. The conclusion of that segment is set to line up perfectly with the conclusion of Season 1, then I'll move on to talking about something else, perhaps Harry Potter, just to fill time and look back on it. The Keys & Kingdoms segment is all about watching Disney films, both purely for the sake of experiencing Disney's history and also for gathering inspiration for the Keys & Kingdoms game and universe. As far as I can tell, it's the only segment anybody actually listens to, and is set to last to at least the end of Season 2, maybe a bit beyond.

When two segments ran out of steam around the halfway point of the season, I introduced the Fanfiction segment, in which I read fics from my ten and counting years of fanfiction-writing to find gold nuggets I can use in later original works as well as see how I've grown as a writer, that'll get me through some Season 2 time as well.

Let's Play Infinity Engine

The first big TAPAS project was successfully kicked off; I had a great time getting actors together for the custom soundsets, and the "full cast" thing was fun for the first four episodes before I abandoned it for being a bit too much work, a bit beyond my talents, and after that, well, I'm currently only 13 episodes into the LP of Icewind Dale, I really gotta get back to playing it more, finish the game for the first time ever. The custom soundsets are up for download on the website; the characters came from Irregular Webcomic, whose author approves of the soundsets!

As the website alludes, once I'm done playing Icewind Dale with the cast of Irregular Webcomic, I intend to do a sequel, playing Icewind Dale II with the cast of The Order of the Stick. At some future point, I also want to play Torment -- really committing to the "Let's Play with a full cast" notion this time -- and do a full playthrough of the Baldur's Gate trilogy with the character my sister Ziya once created, with whom we did not end up finishing the game. Of course, calling Baldur's Gate, Baldur's Gate II, and the Baldur's Gate II expansion pack the Baldur's Gate "trilogy" isn't quite so accurate anymore now that Baldur's Gate III is in production, but I don't really care about that, sticking to the classics.

Let's Play Jackbox

When my mom and sisters came to visit me last June, I thought it would be fun to try playing The Jackbox Party Pack. We did a few videos of that, and then a few more when I visited them in December. Truly classic, and I hope to do a bunch more of those with a bunch more people once I get to Quincy.

Let's Play Dungeon Siege

I impulsively decided to start doing an LP of Dungeon Siege, a guilty pleasure game of mine. I'm currently on Part 7 of that LP; it'll be finished a lot sooner than Icewind Dale, that's for sure, much easier game to play, even with the self-imposed challenges I'm undertaking. In the future, I dream of playing the multiplayer campaign with some people! It'll be difficult, as the game is quite old by software standards, but there are ways.

Disney Retrospectives

Supplements to the Keys & Kingdoms segment of the TAPAS podcast, in which I look at Disney television series and video games. I'm two episodes into The Little Mermaid TV series and those are the most popular videos on the YouTube channel, for whatever that's worth; a lot of people click on them, don't seem to engage with them much. Over the course of Christmas vacation, Naty and I recorded our thoughts on every episode of Gargoyles, which I'll release after I'm done with The Little Mermaid, really excited to get those out there.

The Deities Project

I decided once that the gods of Keys & Kingdoms should be fantasy versions of the Egyptian, Greek, and Norse pantheons. As it turns out, there's a Third Edition D&D supplement, Deities & Demigods, with stats for those exact three pantheons, though nothing about the three of them coexisting in a single world... anyway, there are 53 of them in total and I thought for a cool project I'd design and commission some artwork of what they'll look like in the K&K universe. Casey drew their symbols, and Stacy is working on drawing the gods themselves; she last did the 11th of the 53 gods, Frigga, and... haven't heard from her in a bit, think I'll check in today.

Keys & Kingdoms: The Choices

Keys & Kingdoms is going... well, it's going. I've decided I no longer want to make the cartoon I spoke of earlier in the blog, the direct Kingdoms Hearts parody one, but we're working on something different now.

Early in the Keys & Kingdoms design process, I conducted some market research, asking people what kind of creature they'd choose in a game of K&K. Eventually, I took the combos that ten people chose and turned them into characters for a series, called The Choices because that's what I called the Word document where I logged everyone's decisions.

Eventually, I figured out the medium for this and all other stories. Motion comics! A combination of comics and animation, basically a very, very pretty story reel. It's hard to explain, but you'll see soon enough. Best of both worlds, I get comics without the pain of having to arrange the panels, and voice acting, the easy and fun part of animation, without most of the incredibly time-consuming and expensive parts of animation.

Storyboards for the pilot episode of The Choices are in production now; next week we'll do the rest of the first season, and if we can keep that up, the story will run for five seasons.

Luno Canyon

An audio drama conceived by Naty, which immediately captured my imagination -- the tale of some kids in the paranormal community of Luno Canyon, Arizona. I love audio drama, and hey, it's a lot cheaper than animation. Naty and I are working on writing it, hopefully we'll have something in the next three months and can cast and record it when she visits me in July.

Drizzt and the Companions of the Dance Hall

Well, haven't thought about you in quite some time... I met with a composer last year who started working on the music. I had him switch his focus to working on songs for the Choices pilot and he's been struggling to get that done, busy composer life, but soon I hope he'll be able to get me at least the first four songs, for promotional reasons... and then that we'll finish the score in time to put on the show sometime next year.

The script needs rewrites, to accomodate the three or four years that will have passed since it was first written, especially since Drizzt and the Companions will be starring in an upcoming video game that's sure to bring them back into the spotlight, so we'll have to keep up with that.

~

And that's it for the projects that are in-progress enough to merit their own pages on the TAPAS website... here's everything else I'm planning and working on.

Whirlwind

Well, we finished playing the first volume of that story sometime after I posted about it. Right now I'm working on rewriting the story so it takes place in a 5th Edition universe instead of 4th, then releasing the newly-refurbished Volume 1 as a fanfic, and hopefully continue writing the story in some manner, probably won't be able to return to playing D&D the way we did before, but we'll continue the story in some fashion.

My current ambition for Whirlwind is to turn it into the best damn audiobook ever. The animated adaptation, maybe in the distant future, when we're older.

Kingdom Butts

The new version of the Kingdom Hearts parody I was planning. Like Whirlwind, a literary fanfic project, and like Whirlwind, on the back burner, just working on it whenever I can. A parody, a reimagining in an original Dungeons & Dragons setting, a motherfuckin' musical. Purely a fanfic, but perhaps someday we'll turn it to a visual medium, or at least make a soundtrack album of its many songs.

Better Yet?

This play, written and directed by my friend Mason, is still on the table. We'll get it made and filmed when I return to Quincy in June!

2021 Motion Comics

Next year, we'll produce three motion comic pilot episodes: one for Iris, one for Some Sweet Kind of Vampire, and one for a story of Naty's creation, Depression & Me. Whichever of those becomes the most popular, we'll greenlight for a six-season run! Assuming we can maintain the budget to greenlight such things. The other two, well, we'll continue them when we feel up for it.

Irregular Fantasy!

After a few years of The Choices and whatever takes off in 2021, I'll approach David Morgan-Mar, author of Irregular Webcomic!, about making a loose adaptation of the comic's Fantasy theme -- I've had so much fun playing with his characters in my Icewind Dale LP, I want to play with them in their own unique world, hopefully voiced by the same actors who played them before.

Perhaps Irregular Fantasy! can be the first TAPAS project to be actually animated, if we're big enough by then. If not, well, another animatic then!

Bass

My grandpa Larry passed away just a few months ago. A few years ago, he gave me a screenplay he wrote, about a Denver family of fishermen who are trying to catch a prize-winning giant bass in order to pay their medical bills. It's pretty good. The themes of liberalism and anti-religion, though I pretty much agree with them, are a bit heavy-handed, I'd probably cut those out of the script, but otherwise it's a fun story that'd make for a great indie movie filmed in Denver... so, after The Choices, Irregular Fantasy!, and the 2021 comic reach the end of their run, I hope to do that.

The Secrets of Droon

And then... my ultimate goal is to make an adaptation of my favorite childhood book series, The Secrets of Droon. After Bass, I hope to pitch it to Rooster Teeth and Scholastic, hopefully in time for the series' 30-year anniversary in 2029, the year after the 10th anniversary of TAPAS. If I achieve this, well, that won't be it for me, obviously. Still plenty of stories to tell, to finish.

~

And, well, might as well talk about the projects mentioned earlier on the blog that I haven't already talked about in this post...

Comic Fandubs

Yeah, not gonna do those. It would be fun, but it's too much time and effort to put into non-original material. I'd rather be legitimately creative.

Our Pack, Charlie the Chrash Can, and Page Turners

These projects, well... might get to them, sometime in the future, after all three of the series we release in 2021 have had their day. Or, might not, might have outgrown them by then. Who's to say? Either way, I have my whole life to think about it.

Keys & Kingdoms

As far as the actual Keys & Kingdoms roleplaying game, well, I have no idea how I'm gonna pull that off. I can only hope that the universe will continue to have life beyond The Choices.

~

So, yeah, those are my plans. Well, the more immediate ones are plans, the rest are... more like just dreams. The March 2020 record of my dreams. Let's see how those turn out, and I'll continue with the blog.

UPDATE

Posted this earlier today, and realized thanks to a video posted by Dominic Noble that I had forgotten to add a project to my ten-year plan:

The Eye of Argon

The worst fantasy novel ever written. With that distinction, it deserved to be adapted into a movie. A truly awesome movie. I'll slide it into the schedule after we wrap production on The Choices. I'm thinking rotoscoped animation, truly the only way to tell a barbarian-fantasy story. I wrote the screenplay last November, just a faithful adaptation of the book, now it needs expanding. So, yeah, that's one of my dreams, one I apparently forgot about for a little while: turning a terrible book into a good film. And with rotoscoping, we just might be able to do that on the kind of community theatre budget people will no doubt come to expect from TAPAS by then.

UPDATE

Another update, just so long as it's still the same day as the day I first published this post... Naty has informed me that she wants Depression & Me to just be a small-scale webcomic. So I guess that takes it out of the running to be one of the 2021 pilots, that makes things easier, and hey, a real webcomic under the TAPAS name, sounds good.

UPDATE

Okay, last one. Next update goes on next week's actual post, gonna post weekly from now on. I have two more upcoming projects I want to discuss now that I figured out how my video camera works:

100 Awesome Plans

I purchased a box at the Denver Museum of Art containing "100 Awesome Plans" you can do at home. And, well, I'm going to implement those plans in a 50-video series once I'm living on my own. Should be a fun thing.

The Trivia Box

As a Christmas gift, I got another box with 140 trivia questions. I'm going to use those cards in The Trivia Box, the official TAPAS game show. It won't just be questions and answers, there'll be crazy challenges as well. Just gotta cook those up as well...