May

Haven't done, well, much of anything in a while, besides going to work. Like a lot of creative types, I had hoped the pandemic would be a chance to stay inside and just be creative for a while. Most have found themselves simply too depressed to make any progress. Me, I've been overworked. And also depressed. Slowly starting to bounce back and recover.

Thinking about learning massage again. I went to school for it, passed the classes, but failed the license exam and sucked really bad at studying for a retake, never bothered to try to take it again, forgot about it for a while. But it's something I could do. Apparently. Never once felt like I knew what I was doing, but clearly I did. Also thinking of following my mom's advice of becoming a dog groomer, maybe study to upgrade myself to vet tech.

Therapy is going well... things like meditation, yoga, and deep breathing have always made me anxious and angry instead of calming me down like they're supposed to, making me think I'm some kind of mutant freak. My therapist thinks some sort of trauma has made my limbic system afraid of feeling calm, preferring that I stay alert and on guard, to the detriment of my health. So we're working on that. Also working on my recently-diagnosed ADHD; been on Adderall for two weeks. The first time I took it, it was immediately followed by 24 consecutive hours of playing video games... so that was certainly focus, but not what I would have wanted to focus on. As of the rest of those two weeks, nothing seems to be different, except that my nervous tics are apparently a lot more pronounced. So I've been told, haven't noticed myself.

Still trying to move to Quincy. It's been incredibly difficult so far, because places that allow dogs tend to get snapped up really, really fast. So I've been looking into places that don't allow dogs, and that just makes me sad, I really liked the idea of Sebastian being a fixture of my first home, but if that's not in the cards, well, I'll live. Of course, I don't really know how I'm going to get to Quincy if I do get an apartment, I don't know if trains are running or anything... I'd like to drive there so I don't have to leave behind a single one of my possessions, but realistically I don't think there's anyone who can help me with that right now. I do wish I hadn't lost the ability to drive... God, I'm a mess.

Well, that catches us up for the past month or so, been a little bit longer than that since my last blog post, guess I'll see what else comes to mind before Monday. That seems to have been my tradition, posting on Mondays.

Ooh, well, I suppose there's some TAPAS stuff to talk about. In theory, this is the TAPAS blog, not the Sage blog. Okay, here's one, three more Deities Project pages from Stacy:

Just four more of these to go before the end of this project! That's really cool. And it's gotten me thinking about other Stacy arts... Stacy confronted me last week, asked me to stop pretending that "Team Salmon" is some sort of official creative team and that she's part of the leadership, so, yeah, for the record... Stacy is not some sort of TAPAS and Stuff Productions bigwig, she's just a friend of mine, sometimes I commission her for artwork, she was there when I started TAPAS and the character design I've paid her to do has given me huge amounts of inspiration for actually going through with certain projects in which I hope for her continued participation, but ultimately, Team Salmon is just... it's my group of friends. We met in 2013 on DeviantArt, mostly talking about Cars and My Little Pony; we've gone by many names -- Ponyville Springs, the Ecosystem, the Revived Squad -- Team Salmon is just my personal name for that group and most of them take part in my TAPAS projects whether as volunteers or on commission, but, yeah, my past implications that my friend group is synonymous with the employees of TAPAS and Stuff Productions, people have taken issue with that recently, so -- that was a healthy and eventually welcome reality check. I was being presumptuous about other people's time, I now strive to do better.

Anyway, like I was sayin' -- Stacy art. It was about a year ago now that she created real nice visual designs for the main casts of Some Sweet Kind of Vampire and Iris, both of which I hope to create sometime next year. Not much to say about SSKV, that hasn't changed much in the past ten years, to the point that, as I may have mentioned, it'll be set in 2010 regardless of when it comes out. Well, it's changed a bit; being ten years older I definitely want to remove the old-fashioned purity themes cribbed from Twilight, I see now how unhealthy those are, and not very much fun, the characters of SSKV will absolutely be having sex with their love interests. But, you know, still very much a wholesome, charming show.

What I wanna talk about right now is the character design of Iris. The atmosphere of Iris has gone through a lot of permutations over the years. The main cast of characters has never changed, but the world they inhabit has changed many times. It started off as a straight-up Maximum Ride rip-off, I eventually switched it up by having it take place in the very distant future. More recently, I thought of making it a 2010s genre pastiche in the same way SSKV is, rolling with the young adult dystopia trend of the recent past. Then I briefly thought of heaping on the RWBY influence, and finally decided to make the clothing sense of the series match that of the barbarian fantasy genre, which eventually produced character designs that looked like this:

But I quickly began to think that this didn't make much sense. How, I asked myself, do I reconcile the "barbarian fantasy" aesthetic with the "young adult dystopia" atmosphere? Finally, something came to mind: it's a dystopian future. Obviously, global climate change was a pretty serious thing. The planet is really freakin' hot. But there's not a lot of sunlight. So, there's the reason everyone on the planet would show a lot of skin; they need a way to keep cool and, sunburn not being a concern, the solution is to not wear very much.

So, bearing that in mind, I have to redesign most of these outfits. The goal is no longer to show as much skin as possible, it's to realistically keep cool in a hot environment. No more boots or helmets or heavy coats. What little actual barbarian-themed skimpiness remains in the above designs, gonna get rid of that, these need to be modern sexy outfits.

Also, I need to make a final decision on the ages of the five main characters, the Eyes of Gaia; Iris has always been 17, the others' ages have fluctuated a lot, I think I've made a final decision that really works for the character dynamic and the motivations of the evil university who designed these mutants; Iris is 17, the others are 15. With that in mind, I'll be de-sexualizing Raquelle and Meggi and possibly the boys as well; still dressed for the weather, but not dressed for overt eye candy. We'll leave the actual fanservice to the adult characters. So, yeah, lots of Iris redesigns coming in the future. Not now, Iris isn't the priority right now.

The priority right now is Keys & Kingdoms: The Choices. The original audition period, which was open from mid-March to mid-April, produced no results, save auditions from Kenzie and Stacy for their namesake characters; I found them to be surprisingly unfit for the characters that were originally based on them. Mid-March was, of course, when the pandemic went into the public eye as a thing that was going on and the world got locked down, so, I certainly don't blame the entire city of Quincy for being too frightened, overworked, and/or bummed out to try out for my little art project.

I reopened the auditions on the first of May, once again for a month's time. As of this writing, one week away from the deadline... still no auditions from anyone in Quincy, just from my two sisters and again from Stacy, trying out for some other characters. But people have expressed more interest, I figure they're just waiting for that last week. If I'm wrong and I still don't get any auditions, then, screw it, I'm gonna fill the cast by deciding who I want. Hopefully it doesn't come to that and I have some juicy auditions to help me make an informed decision.

On the verge of having a recording studio booked, applied for a few apartments, still don't know how I'm going to get to Quincy, fingers crossed that trains are still running as long as everyone wears a mask...

While the casting is slow-going, Keys & Kingdoms progress is being made elsewhere; got lots of people storyboarding. Myself included. In theory. I haven't drawn in like a year, I'm scared to try again, but I'll get to it.

Top to bottom: storyboard frames by McKenzie Eby, Casey Gosselin, Nathalie Jenfjord, and Sadie Allen.

Lots of art and technology levels from lots of different storyboarders, but that's not a problem, it'll all even out in the next step. I absolutely adore how seriously everyone is taking the storyboards; if anything, I'm the one taking them the least seriously because I'm more concerned about speed than quality, I've had a "they're just storyboards" mentality, everyone else has a "backbone of the episode" mentality. I suppose everyone else is right. Well, that just makes me more nervous about the fact that I assigned myself to board a scene. Better get started.

Just did a little reread of the blog, I have said a lot of things in this post that I've already said in previous posts. I guess I only have so many thoughts and don't always remember when I've already said them.

So, as of the fine Monday morning of this posting... well, I've checked, the trains are running, just need to wear a mask and comply with all the other various precautions, so, I can get to Quincy whenever that time comes; applied for a number of apartments and haven't gotten any replies yet. The guy who runs the recording studio is receptive to taking on my project, and as of yesterday I've gotten some Quincy auditions at last and I'm really happy and giggly about that. On Saturday I'll be picking out the cast. I don't anticipate actually getting enough auditions to cast all eight characters that way, but I'm fully prepared for Plan C: going with my preconceived notions of the characters and begging those people to take on the roles, I don't got a problem with that.

And there we go, the blog is back and, well, the plan is for the podcast and the channel to be back tomorrow, but, you know, don't quote me on that. Thank you for your time.