All Too Human
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Rambles, Rants, and Musings

January 22nd, 2016 (Thank God I'm Back)

1/22/2016

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"Wait...weren't you back yesterday?"
Well, blogging, sure. I was back blogging yesterday. But mentally, no. I was still bitter (albeit recovering slowly), not to mention, so depressed I wanted to cave in and play video games of some sort yesterday. (I didn't. Came REAL close, but ultimately did something more productive. But more on that in a bit.)

Today...no fake smiles. I've been genuinely smiling for hours. I feel happy. Energetic. Now granted...first thing I do when I get home will still be taking a nap. No matter how enthusiastic I've gotten, my job still leaves me needing extra sleep every day. But...I'm actually feeling GOOD today, and that is a feeling which is unmistakable.

It's not just the feelings, either! Passion, too. Those are separate things. Feelings are for my emotions, passion is for my fundamental drive. Both have been dead-or-worse lately, and now I've got both back, in part for what I actually did do last night. So...you remember how I felt like gaming, right? (It's literally the blog post right before this, so, uh, yeah, you probably would. But just in case.)

Well...Chrono Trigger wasn't something I was in the mood for at the time. And...my options for gaming really aren't as vast as you'd think. (My PS2 requires memory cards which I'm not sure are there, would require me hooking it up to my TV via hunting down the appropriate cords, and then there's the whole matter of nowhere to plug it in for power. My 360 is currently plugged in, but has the same powering issues as the PS2 would have. I have a gameboy advanced SP, but I wasn't feeling any particular game, be it gameboy or GBA. So basically, games on the computer are generally my only realistic option.)

Only problem is...not enough time for a long game (I hadn't done my internet rounds for the night and it was like 8 PM at the time: given that it takes me ~3 hours to do my internet rounds, that meant at absolute most, four hours available), but too much time for a short game. Then there's the whole matter of where I would play the game. My computer, as in the laptop, does not handle internet games very well. My desktop was unavailable because my mom was on it.

So...no internet games. And even if I could, they'd run into the above problem of too short or too long, none at that "just right" level. At least, none that I haven't already played and/or beaten. (Plus, me being the type for 100% completion, even short games can suddenly become a marathon to reach that number.)

There's always the option of downloading a game through totally-legal-and-legitimate-sources and playing it on a totally-okay-and-not-at-all-violating-copyright-laws emulator (you know, kind-of like how I play Chrono Trigger in the first place), but the options there are also limited by the metric, mostly of the "too long" type. Or too hard, in the case of, say, Cave Story. (I forget if it was this laptop or my other laptop which I was playing it on, but I made it to the special bonus level of hell--pretty accurate given all the magma--thanks to a walkthrough telling me how to get the perfect ending, but because that level is ridiculously hard to complete on one gothrough and there's no save points at least until after the boss, I could never beat it: I could only GET to the boss in like 1/3 runs, and whenever I reached the boss I was at like one or two health, so I had trouble memorizing the boss's attack patterns, meaning I'd die early-on in the boss fight every time because, again, no save point, no health refill, having to navigate a gauntlet of fire every time just to maybe reach the boss.)

Like...I know on my old computer, I downloaded and played the original Final Fantasy, but that game is actually kinda both. It's ridiculously easy to find yourself underleveled unless you do a TON of level grinding, which is tedious and takes a ton of time, and the plot advances pretty slowly. Maybe that's because I just suck at combat, but it's a surprisingly challenging game. (Technically that download also had copies of the first seven games, too. I was surprised it had seven, so I checked that out, and it's not the original seven; it's a spriteified version of it. Don't know about 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6, but presumably they're like the originals given that the originals were still 2D. Never played them, though, because I wanted to beat the original first and never got strong enough to do so.)

So anyway, the point is...I didn't really have many gaming options available. So instead...I did art. See, I'm going to be using FireAlpaca for Red Hood Rider. It's a program I've heard nothing but praise for, and more than that, I've seen some killer comics that use it. It's also apparently very tablet-friendly (though I, uh...kinda sorta...lost my tablet's stylus pen, so...can't use it at all right now?), and generally a good art program.

It does seem decent, albeit not perfect, having some neat stuff in it. It's just that...I'm utterly inexperienced in using it. Jumping straight into making Red Hood Rider via comic pages with no experience in the program seemed like a very bad idea. So I decided I'd do something to gain experience. Which is what I set out to do: practice using the program.

So...I practiced! Previously, I had made an absolutely-botched attempt. Look at this, and I think you can see why I considered the drawing a miserable failure. (This one was made with the tablet, mind you, for the most part.)
Picture
...Okay, so full disclosure, on this blog which has a white background, you won't be able to see how the majority of the image is transparent, so you won't be able to see unless you really really squint your eyes (technically the background for the blog isn't pure white; I made sure of that) that there are actual speech bubbles here.

Still, while this image was an utter failure (if you can't tell, it's crossover fanart), it was a great learning experience. I learned that text in FireAlpaca is really, really large (the above was size three font), and while it can be easily edited/moved around, it cannot have in the same text a change in bold/italics/underline. By which, I mean, to make the italics, I needed a separate text box. I also noted that each text box, similar to GIMP, automatically has its own layer. (I'll figure out how to group layers in a folder I think next time.)

I also discovered that, while I did botch the art, and the speech bubbles were terribly done (using the lasso tool to paint them), I loved the no-black-outline approach and would include it in the remake. (For my actual comic, though, I think I'll still be using the black outline, simply because it is common in both western comics and in eastern manga. A lack of lines implies some sort of other aspect to the speech bubble, like distance--the speaker not being shown--or telepathy or an inner monologue or such.)

I also re-discovered the limitations of the airbrush tool: not so great for making lineart (because the lineart will have the white aliased line in there as shown prominently above), and how just blindly painting with the paint bucket tool will produce an ugly monotone color. (Flats are...flat.)

Plus, I was winging it anatomically and positionally, which shows. Time for round two!
Using just the mouse, I was still able to produce something yesterday (in about three hours or so) that has reinvigorated my passion, my flame, for Red Hood Rider. Just see for yourself as for why!
Picture
...Okay. So it's still not perfect. This is, more obviously, Drake from Re:Set, the comic I'm doing crossover fanart for. I botched the coloring on him epically. Like...it's hard to screw up worse than how I did. On my laptop which I'm typing this on, he actually doesn't look too terrible, but I looked at the result on the desktop (and I know for a fact that my desktop is generally closer to what most people see than my laptop) and the coloring is just...awful.

The lineart's not great on him, and I forgot his signature pencil above the ear. (The choice to leave out his camera, though, was a deliberate choice.) Then, you get to Ruby. I'm not 100% satisfied with her pigtails, I don't think I nailed her hairstyle, I think her neck is too long, the coloring for her hair definitely is off, her domino mask is too small, and there are many, many, MANY details missing from her outfit (didn't get the zipper on her pockets, didn't get the seems on her arms, didn't draw her two hairties, didn't draw Angel Wings in his sealed bracelet form, and didn't draw her gloves), not to mention, the lineart for her is WAY more shaky for Drake and I don't feel her clothing is quite as organic as it should be (too tight for the arms, not tight enough for the chest area given a lack of shown breast outline, and again too tight for the bottom of her hoodie).

...Plus, as it turns out, the paint tool by default has antialiasing on, a very much not wanted feature which you can see via the speech bubbles by looking at them close enough. (There's small gaps, caused by the paint tool.) That doesn't even begin to go into how the airbrushed colors are a little bit too transparent. (Exercise: copy this image and paste the image url into different browsers which each have different backgrounds. Black for Firefox I think, white for chrome I think, and so on and so forth. Observe how, on each background, the colors change to match the background color, becoming blacker on black and whiter on white. That's because of the nature of the airbrush tool in relationship to opacity.)

...All the same...

...In spite of those flaws?

...I love. Love. Love. This image. It's ridiculously promising. I love the technique I used. (I made a black background and set its opacity to like 12%, which is why the above background is not pure white, allowing for the text to stick out more.) I like how each color I used on Ruby came out. Her hoodie's colors are perfect, and her skin color's great, and her eye color is excellent. (Not to mention, a great expression on her face, too.)

I did cheat a little bit: I used QAVimator images for both Ruby and Drake, positioning the models, then scaling up the images of them to fill the canvas up, and basically traced them to get the anatomy right, but this is basically no different from what I'll be doing on my actual pages, where I'll be tracing my own artwork. (For the most part, aside from small corrections.)

Most of the flaws, though, I think can be fixed with simple practice. For instance, that transparency issue? A quick easy fix would be introducing the concept of 'lighting'. (I've only done this once before, on a NSFW image of a friend to a female werewolf: I used yellowish 'sunlight' and had it fill their silhouette a layer or two below the artwork. With me using airbrushes--or was it just not having the color layer fully opaque, I don't remember which--the result was that some yellow popped in without the background in there.) Said lighting would be a simple, 30-second fix, once I have established the lineart layer as being finished: just use the magic wand tool, get everything inside the lineart selected, and color it the color of the light source. (Yellowish for sun, blueish for most indoor lighting, etc.)

...That might not get the right exact color I'm hoping for, though, so I've got a second step in mind: flats. As in, a layer above the lighting, explicitly set to a lower opacity level as to allow the light through (it's a weird concept to think of light as the lower layer and lineart as the highest layer, but it actually works), and have flat colors that will represent the actual colors of the image.

Then from there, just airbrush away. Using the same technique I did above (basically, every spot has three different colors, except the black: adjusted with coloring slightly, saturation slightly, and luminescence slightly to produce three similar colors with one as a middle, two others being slightly different base colors with higher or lower saturation and being either darker or lighter), the results should be similar, except...even better.

I think...I think I can actually make this work!
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Well...here I am.

1/21/2016

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RRRRG. I'm trying to upload my blogs from previous days, as I speak, but weebly is being a royal pain right now. By which, I mean: basically, not working. At all.

This is rather inconvenient, given that I have a week and two days' worth of blogging to do.

Don't really have much for today, other than saying I have a very, very, VERY strong urge to play video games of some sort, but I don't have access to my mom's computer, any RPG I can think of I don't currently hold an interest in, and I'm not keen on playing online, so it'd have to be a game that I could get working.

Namely, Civ 3. Which I'm not fond of doing the vanilla of. It'd have to be an expansion, which I'd have to install.

Butyeah. Back, kinda sorta.

Still very, very depressed, as given by the fact that I'd resort to gaming.

By the time you read this, you'll know why I've been so down, and where I've been at (check out the January 18th blog, which in spite of me titling it its release date, has also been given a further title, something I usually reserve only for blogs released the day OF said blog, like today's), so...yeah.

Not pleasant.

But...I'm alive!

Never did get around to rambling about superheroes I know, but oh well. The book inspiring the ramble is out in the living room. One of these days, it'll hit.
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January 20th, 2016

1/20/2016

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It becomes increasingly obvious with every passing moment: I've given up on life. I'm going through the motions, but every time I find myself alone, I break out in what would be tears if I could biologically cry. (Seriously, you have no clue. NO CLUE. How important crying is until you can no longer yourself cry. For all those out there that would consider yourselves crybabies, or are called such as an insult: take pride in how much you cry, for it is a GOOD thing, not something you should be ashamed about. Because, speaking as someone who can't cry, not crying is infinitely worse than crying a lot.)

Instead, I just have a long, long moment of nothingness, of emptiness, the feeling I get every passing day, as I continue an existence that I absolutely despise.

Increasingly, I find myself bitter and angry at everything. While my private nature plus professionalism keeps me from actually doing so, I mentally lash out at other people, and though I try to hide it, I suspect my body language betrays my disgust, of how I'm judging them when I have absolutely no right to.

It's just...I wear a fake smile at work every day, but said smile is getting harder and harder to maintain. It used to be occasionally genuine, and even when not, often my emotions were neutral, so smiling wasn't hard. (It was, like, "Hmm, I'm not feeling anything, but they're expecting something. Better smile." Easy enough!) Yet now?

...Now, with my self-loathing and how I want to take it out by exploding at innocent people, means it's much harder. Ever try smiling when you feel rage, hate, sadness, despair, and all-around emptiness? It's not easy. I'm not well. I'm doing terribly, and not getting any better. I'm miserable and tired. Emotionally. Mentally. Even physically. I'm getting more sleep, but it's restless. I just...have given up. Not a pretty sight.

I did sort-of half-write a song about it, though that's literally the one good note I have to say of today.
It goes:

I'm sick of all of this
Why can't you understand?
Tired of all of the
Fighting you'd have me do.

Days drag on and on
Breaking piece by piece
Hatred is slowly re-
Placing all my joy.

Sadness strikes my heart,
At the very core
Back before my pain, I
Laughed yet now I cry.

Dealing with the same ol'
Fear that I'm alone,
Being in this despair,
Feeling that life's not fair.



I rather like the rhyme scheme. Didn't finish it, kinda scrapped the idea when I realized it not only was sung to THE tune but was a complete tune repeat of a prior song, but I think the lyrics are good and I love the idea, of having the first word of the verse be where the rhyme is at rather than the traditional last. Makes it feel a little bit improvised, which was the vibe I was going for. A free-flow sort of thing.
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January 19th, 2016

1/19/2016

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So today was Tuesday.
That...might not mean anything to you, but recognize the date.
Tuesday.
January.

Meaning either exactly two years ago, or two years and one week ago (depending on whether it was the second or third Tuesday of the month, which I don't remember), I had the car accident, which set me on the path to womanhood.

It's a date I feel like I should have done something to celebrate being alive for, but...can't think of anything.

I wanted to also talk about something vaguely Red Hood Rider-related, namely, superheroes and how I'm actually not that much of a fangirl of them in spite of being one of the larger comic geeks in the family, but oh well.

Maybe tomorrow.

(For that matter, maybe tomorrow I'll actually POST MY DANG BLOG.)
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January 18th, 2016 (epic meltdown)

1/18/2016

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Sooooooooooooooo...the internet's down.
AGAIN.

RIGHT in the middle of something REALLY IMPORTANT.
At least when it went down yesterday, it had the courtesy of going down in the middle of something not-so-important. (Albeit before I could actually DO the important stuff...which, you know. Is basically just as bad. Since now I can't do the important stuff AGAIN.)

You have no clue.
NO clue.

How frustrating it is to have unexplained, unannounced downages like this which ABSOLUTELY SCREW with your life.

I do seriously live on the internet. I needed them to talk to, about some things, and before I got the chance to, THIS happened, interrupting the whole thing.

Basically, I needed to vent, about a lot of the things I have had going on, stuff that I wasn't really planning on blogging about, because the stuff I wanted to blog about is different stuff that I have piled up.

More or less, it comes to how I've gotten into a very bad place. The staff meeting on Saturday talked about transgender-related things a bit, no harm there given a now-benign policy, and staff present seeming to accept it well enough. The problem came when I had to deal with changing into my swim attire...and that's when dysphoria hit me.

HARD.

Like...really, really, REALLY hard. And that put me in a worse mindset of not wanting to do anything at all. My mind just...kinda...shut down. It hit me hard. Really, really, really, REALLY hard. That pain. That overwhelming, intense sensation, where I wished I could break down crying but even if that was socially acceptable to do it's biologically impossible for me.

That feeling. Of being a freak. You know Shinichi, from Parasyte? He's a great character for displaying traits of autistic people. He might not have been meant that way. But that portrayal is DEAD ON for what someone like me actually, truthfully, is like: someone who on the surface is normal enough, but is physically incapable of having those intense emotions be on display.

I can't cry. I wanted to. I really, really wanted to cry in that moment. Where I shut down and could do nothing. But...I couldn't. No social pressure holding me back in the unisex bathroom I was changing in. Purely biological, that intense overpowering emotion defying words, sadness, fear, confusion, longing, anger, despair, all in one moment...yet I could do absolutely nothing to display this strong emotion. Because...because it's just not in me. My autism prevents me from venting like that.

That feeling, it's so...damaging. Feeling like you're broken. Feeling like there's something so fundamentally WRONG in your life, and being unable to do anything about it.

...And all of this accelerated the feeling I knew was already there, that of my depression.

Why do you think it's been hard for me to get my blog up and running?

Why do you think I've had trouble posting anything?

Why do you think I haven't mentioned Red Hood Rider work?

It's because I've done almost none.
I've...crashed.
It's like I've given up. Not just on Red Hood Rider. On life itself.
That feeling is not an easy one to admit. I wanted to talk to others about it, not to an empty blog I'm lucky people even are vaguely aware exists, yet alone, read. Heck, even if people DO read this.

Know how many comments I get on my blog?

Basically zero.

Know how many comments people give me about my blog? Like, PMs saying they've read or skimmed it and they give some vague feedback?
A few, scattered here and there, but never consistently. It's once in a blue moon. How often do those happen? Once, twice a year? Maybe three times? So probably quite literally that amount of times, is how often I get those PMs.

For the vast majority of the time...no comments.

Nothing.

People saying they read the blog. Which in a more reasonable state of mind, I'd be inclined to believe.

...Yet in my current state of mind? I even doubt that. I shouldn't. It's terrible to say. I'm basically, in my mind, calling the people who are trying to support me liars. Do you know how awful that is to say? Yet here I am. In my rambles. In my depression...thinking it anyway. So I'm sorry to those who read this. You're reading it, after all. You deserve better than to be doubted.

...But I can't give you that because in my current state of mind, I have nothing but negative in mind.

This is basically a tangent, to what I was going to say: I don't like venting my thoughts purely on my blog for a simple reason: that lack of feedback. It's not your fault, readers. I can't realistically expect anyone to read this blog. I've said so many times. It's supposed to be a daily blog, but my update times and dates are WILDLY inconsistent. And the content of the blog is, too!

Sometimes I say nothing of any value, filler just to say I posted during that day. Should I expect that to be read? No.

Other times I write what could seriously be a novella, pretty sure some of my longer blog posts (heck, this blog post is long yet isn't even CLOSE to the length of some of my longest blog posts!) reach that sort of length. Can I expect them to be read? Heck no. I can't even expect them to be skimmed!

And my posts go on long tangents. Stream of thought posting is how my blog works, mostly, so it's disjointed.

So it's not your doing. It's mine. (Plus there's also the lack of advertisement. I do have in my sig a link to the blog. I do have the blog public enough where it's easy to find. I do reference it on occasion. But I don't accentuate JUST how much the blog can mean, though.)

Yet that fact remains true regardless. Don't feel guilty about it, that'd only make ME feel guilty about making you feel guilty. But the simple truth is: on this blog, I don't get feedback. I'm venting to a wall. A wall that is basically just a place for me to get things off my chest.

...But it's not a place where I can get that feedback, and I'm in a mindset where I could REALLY have used that. Which is why I didn't want this on the blog, where I'd get none. I wanted it posted to a place where people would give their thoughts, give their support, even if just simple things I already know. Like...even just hearing them say "hugs".

It's not an instantaneous feedback; this isn't a live chat thing. But within a day or two, I've got people there. They can't do anything tangible to help me. Never can. Not given MY problems. They can't even do much which I don't already do myself.

...But it's still there. People, giving their thoughts. People, giving their words. People, giving what little support they can, even though they know just as well as I do that what they give is basically worthless.

It's enough, though. They get me out of that rut. Because people helping me, no matter how little, is still PEOPLE, responding to me, showing that I'm not alone.

And that's the feeling internet isolation forces upon me.

Now...with that said...still need to talk about Red Hood Rider.

Basically...got nothing done at all on it, still. I got in a bad rut. So I went back to one of my largest inspirations, Rain, and read the entire webcomic over the course of three days. It helped. A lot. For a short while, until Saturday crushed my spirits yet once more.

But I did manage to produce some content. Not much, mostly filler images which I'll get up at some point, but enough to have made some progress.

Soyeah.

I crashed and burned.

Trying to recover now.
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January 17th, 2016

1/17/2016

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Not my fault this time! I lost internet before I could finish my nightly routine.

...Okay. So admittedly. This was at 1:45 am in the morning. I could have come sooner, while I did have internet, to post the blog, but I needed my nap, took it, and not long after that, surprisingly, my mom said she was done with the computer for the day, so I took my opportunity.

...Most of my day was wasted hanging out on a CF hangout, watching Russian films streamed via screen sharing on Youtube, with occasional translations provided (there were no subs) by the one doing the stream, a CF friend who happens to be Russian. (They're fairly fluent in both, given they have no problem speaking English and I've heard their conversations with family in Russian.)

Soyeah.

I haven't talked about anything I wanted to. So much stuff...so little conversation.

Man, it's almost like I should be running a BLOG to get it all out, now, isn't it?
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January 16th, 2016

1/16/2016

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Family over, staff meeting, generally busy time.

Swear I'll blog tomorrow (yeah, right, like that's a promise people actually believe), but for now:

Animez.

Late night stuff.

Need to get life back on track.
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January 15th, 2016

1/15/2016

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Uhg, so tired...caught up on CF, but took me to 5 AM.

Computer needs restart, so writing not typing blog, no patience to wait. Sleep now, talk about work later.
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January 14th, 2016

1/14/2016

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ARG!

Falling so behind...on everything...no time...guh.
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January 13th, 2016

1/13/2016

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Nnnng.

Still need to do SO much stuff.

Getting up SO early tomorrow, though.

AHG.
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