The Best Yet?

All right, when I post this blog Monday morning... it will be the release date of Better Yet? Yup, that's right. Comes out in, like... 12 hours now. That's very exciting. I'm gonna be working hard at promoting it from the moment it unleashes itself on the public. #BetterYet, everybody! Well, the hashtag probably won't really go anywhere. But how about some YouTube comments? I get a very satisfying amount of views and likes on my videos but almost no comments. It's creepy as hell. Like watching a silent, staring crowd. If you watch it, just shout us out.

It's also time for other tasks of TAPAS Phase Two that I've been trying to dive back into. New podcast episodes in time, but mostly things like making sure the website is up-to-date and everyone has proper credit for everything they've done. It's a lot to go through.

Here's a simple new online avatar that I pasted together for myself, it's the new header image on my Twitter page. If you already know, then you know, and you're my favorite kind of people. If you don't know, these are two characters from RWBY; very very minor characters, but on the left we have Sage Ayana and on the right, Shay Mann. It's rare to see my first name or my last name in media, but here's a show that has both, ain't that remarkable. SageMann could very well be their ship name, if anyone ships them, which, despite the fact that they've never even appeared in the same season of the show together, is entirely possible. I'm hoping to commission something a little later, an actual drawing of them together, holding up little signs that say "Sage" and "Mann" like they're at the airport or something.

But, that's not a big priority, we've got lots of other stuff to work on right now. We're gonna try to give Better Yet? plenty of time to simmer and be the thing we have out right now, but we're also nearing the next step for our big fantasy stories, and that's gonna be super-exciting.

And, er, okay, that's all I've got to say. I have not had a chance to actually get to that Phase Two stuff yet. I'm starting now, Monday morning, for sure taking a break in the evening when the show launches to make sure everybody knows and it's promoted properly!

The Tethercat Principle

This'll be kind of a "random thoughts" blog; just wanted to discuss a thought from a few weeks ago while Mason, Isaac, and I were working on editing Better Yet?; I observed (mild spoiler alert) that the last time the character of Jodie is seen, she's sobbing at the end of Act 2, Scene 2. There are three more scenes after that, and Jodie makes no appearance in any of them. This works with the direction the story goes, and it's fortunate, I joked with the other guys, that the final scene mentions that she's pulled together, otherwise, since she was so inconsolable last time we saw her, the audience might worry that she never recovered.

Some call this the "Tethercat Principle"; basically, it's the assumption that whatever it is the characters were doing last time you heard from them, they're still doing that. It's called that based on a Far Side comic which depicts two dogs using a cat as a tetherball. Readers were devastated rather than amused, and Gary Larson later wrote that perhaps they would have found the comic more palatable if the caption, rather than simply reading "Tethercat", had told that the cat eventually escaped and got his revenge. Otherwise, it feels like the cat will be stuck in the tethercat predicament forever.

It doesn't just apply to fiction, you know. It's kind of the way the human brain works. Think about it: if a person is wearing the same outfit they were wearing last time you saw them, or are sitting in the exact same spot where you left them, your first impulse is to be alarmed that they've been wearing that outfit or sitting in that spot the entire time since you parted ways. When you see someone you haven't seen in years, you're stunned that they've gotten older. I guess we all still carry that teensy bit of childlike narcissism, assuming that people kinda hang from coathooks waiting for us when we're away.

And here's another one! A less recent thought, but one I remembered, a big realization I had upon studying Dungeons & Dragons books in preparation for Keys & Kingdoms stuff. There's a big difference in designing creatures for video games, which is where I originally took my inspirations, and doing so for tabletop games. In a video game, every unique creature costs time and money to design and construct, so often you want as many creatures as possible to use models you already have, just maybe change their colors and a few accessories, and so you have a bunch of enemies that all look pretty much the same, but each has different statistics and abilities to challenge you. In a tabletop game, there's no limited graphics processor to constrain creature design and there's also no computer calculating the stats for you - both are entirely in your own brain, therefore it's easier if every creature looks different but they all have the same stats. Isn't that interesting?

Anyway, yeah, that'll be the end of today's random thoughts blog. It's a couple of days late because I've been waiting to see the final cut of Better Yet?, and that was delivered last night. It's coming very, very soon.

And We're Back!

Okay, it is July 9, should be releasing this blog in a couple of days. Got my computer back! New hard drive, with my old one cloned on it, so didn't lose anything, that's nice... gotta be a little bit careful with my USB ports so I don't jostle them; my video drivers were upgraded, and it was recommended to make sure the thing is well-ventilated, perhaps with a cooling pad. I've never heard of such a thing before, but they sure look snazzy. Microsoft Office is still a little funky and glitchy, but nothing I can't live with. As far as I can tell, it is at least faster now. We'll see what becomes of it.

Being without my computer for a little over a week left me much time alone with my thoughts... thoughts I put into my mini tape recorder! Well, it's digital, there's no tape in it. But, you know, just one of those things. I try to empty out my tape recorder every day, sort out all the various ideas into the individual documents for all the stories and projects; some of which are well-organized, others of which are currently a 50-page mish-mash of every idea I've ever had for the project with no organization, not helped by just tacking every new idea I have onto the end. One of these days I'll organize them, whenever jumping upon that particular project becomes a priority!

Anyway, like I said, I try to empty out the recorder every day. Sometimes if there are 30 messages or so, or if a lot of them are over 3 minutes long, it's a hard task to accomplish. With my computer gone, I ended up recording over 385 messages, many of which were over 10 minutes in length... over the past few days with the computer back, I have sorted through a good amount of it, including all those that are longer than 2 minutes, so I'm down to about 250 altogether, and... all short now. So, still quite a bit of climbing to do, but well on track to getting normal life back on schedule. With lots and lots of new ideas.

Sunday night now, July 11. Oh, I am well prepared to release this blog tomorrow morning. Mostly 'cause I just said everything I'm about to say in the TAPAS insider Facebook group. Guess it was insider information for, like, twelve hours, tops, hehe.

Spent this evening with Isaac in the studio, continuing to refine Better Yet? I had to substitute for our director Mason, who was in sitzprobe for Chicago - that, if you didn't know, is a long day of rehearsal in which the actors and the orchestra have a sit-down and run through all the songs together for the first time. Isaac and I listened to the whole 90-minute show, periodically stopping to make some modifications, but it didn't feel like it took that long at all. We've got a quality product here! Just that much of a delight to listen to, I guess.

After that, we discussed what we were doing next, and as it turns out, Isaac going out of town at the end of this week isn't a brief trip like the last time, he's straight-up going on tour, there'll only be small windows of time over the next couple of months where he'll be back in town and might possibly have a chance to let us into the studio. So my assumption that things could really get started up once Chicago ends its run on August 1, not gonna pan out. But that's not a problem! This means we have more time to storyboard, and to get the actors prepared for whenever it is we can do the voice-acting thing.

Also this evening, the Keys & Kingdoms storyboards reached 90% completion! I need to edit some more scenes stat, I did the first scene and the last scene and haven't had a chance to do all the rest that are finished. In the shots that were completed today, we finally see something I've been waiting to see since I created these characters: boobs! Yeah, if I haven't established yet that K&K will feature boobs, it certainly will, though... I'm beginning to rethink trying to put them on YouTube. It would just be so much of a bummer if the show was impossible for a prospective fan to just happen to stumble upon, just because boobs equals 18+ and that equals hidden. And even more of a bummer if the episodes were marked 18+ but then still deemed too inappropriate for YouTube and got deleted.

I still want to make my statement, so I'm thinking that the YouTube version will, like, censor the nudity really obnoxiously so you can't forget that you're not watching the real version of the show, and then the uncensored version will be found elsewhere. I'm not trying to be vulgar here, you know, just trying to #freethenipple. Sure, people find breasts sexually attractive, but that's also true of lips and necks and legs and any other part of a person's body you could name, why are women's nipples just as forbidden as actual sex organs? Nonsense, I say.

So... at this point, wasn't feeling like I could expect all storyboards and final character designs to be done by August 1, so, hopefully they're done in that vicinity at least. Post-Chicago we're definitely gonna get to work on writing further stages of these fantasy projects. And I'll at least start gathering up the actors and talking to them in more depth about what the heck we're doing - in the end that's probably a better idea than the current notion of getting them into the studio, like, right away.

And in the meantime, the final audio cut of Better Yet? will assuredly be done this week! And the release date, mmm, not too far in the future, I want to prepare for it and give it a bit of fanfare, but it'll be out for sure. This is very exciting, got a thing that's almost done.