In spite of me no longer procrastinating, I am taking way too long to finish each page of Red Hood Rider. Do you want to know why?

I'll tell you why!

...Rather, it's more accurate to say...I'll SHOW you why.

Yeah, THIS is why. See that? Normally, I wouldn't brag. Normally, I'd be ranting about all the things which aren't good in this picture. And it's true! The image is flawed in several ways. I'm still iffy about the anatomy, the pose, everything. There's also the weird art glitch for the eyes and eyebrow in regards to the mask. (You can see an outline as if there's antialiasing combined with a paint job akin to MS Paint editing...but only when zoomed out; when zoomed in, that disappears, which is backwards from what it should be--if it were actually that, then zooming in should make it MORE obvious.) But...it's just so...so...beautiful.

And I'm not even done yet! This image could pass for finished, yes? Well, it's not! You might not be able to tell thanks to the overlaid original-sketch hiding it well, but a lot of the detail work has yet to be done. The socks need to have their texture done to look more like actual socks. (Right now, the stuff you see there is the original sketch at low opacity, which is a neat effect, but not good enough.) The hair similarly lacks the linework which makes it more hair-like. (All the work you see done already is, again, from the original sketch.)

Furthermore, the secondary colors for her skin, hair, and hoodie haven't been added in, when they are absolutely vital to give her a more lifelike look. (Right now, the coloring's just the flats with some detail-work.) That doesn't even begin to cover that her hoodie also needs texture-work done, so it looks more like clothing! (You can see quite a bit of this in the sketch overlay, but again, the sketch isn't good enough, here.)

This doesn't even go into the highlights and shadows I've yet to add. I have added in a backlight (a yellow light that was copied from the lineart, put behind it, and filled in to be a solid silhouette covering everything that's, well, colored, at some reduced opacity, then turning the lineart off--this, combined with the flats not being at 100% opacity gives a 'shine' from behind) and a front-shadow (a copy of the backlight layer, colored black, put in front of everything except the faded sketch, and reduced WAY down in opacity), but these are cheap tricks.

They happen to be cheap tricks which create a super-cool effect (this image would be 10% less badass without them), one of two that I employ (the other being the sketch overlay, which makes the image be at least 30% more badass), but they are not proper lighting/shading, just shortcuts to them.

When I actually do lighting/shading, I usually use an airbrush with solid white (highlights) and solid black on two separate layers, and toy with the opacity until it looks about right for what I'm going for. (Said highlights/lowlights are just me improvising for the most part off of instinct on where I "feel" the lighting would go. I am fairly incompetent at making these predictions, but I do at least try.)

So I'd say I'm about half-finished, in spite of around 5-10 hours of work on the image thusfar.

Remember, this was my earlier art, which--while more detailed in some ways--was mostly sloppier than my later stuff. So this is the quality of what I'll be doing at my lower points. And it already looks this badass. In spite of not being done yet.

I am going to seriously enjoy making this comic, given that this is what I'm making right now.

It's just that...well...it's incredibly time-consuming! I know I'm a good artist. This type of stuff is not something which is easy to sculpt. It's a delicate craft, one which takes a lot of time to master. And yet, I am building, I am creating, it all the same. I'm just...not exactly the fastest of artists.

Really cold.

The same 69 degrees, cold.

You'd think that I'd have learned my lesson from yesterday.
Yet I was still shivering today, really, really badly at that.

...But the thing is, this time, I actually was wearing my warmup clothes, both the jacket and the pants. The shivering wasn't as bad as yesterday, but it was still pretty strong all the same. So apparently, I need a whole heck of a lot more than my normal clothing once the temperature drops below 70 degrees, which is just...sad.

Speaking of yesterday, for 1/2 Prince, I finished what you might call the original material...but there's the sequel material, post-timeskip. The problem is...apparently, it's not finished. Now, my limited research was of little help. It couldn't tell me if this was the manhua being unfinished, or the scanlators being unfinished. But I did confirm that on the official site, the last thing I read was the last thing released.

So, apparently not as completed as I thought it was! Oh, well. It'll be worth the wait, assuming it's not abandoned. I'll just have to try reading the original light novels soon, then. (Not now, obviously.)

If you're wondering what effect this had on my productivity: well, it did have a minor influence, not gonna lie, but I was still able to complete some work on Red Hood Rider all the same. I'm in a similar situation as to yesterday (waking up at 2:30, closer to the norm for me, but leaving at 5:30), so I might do some more today, though I might not.

I was inspired yesterday by my Tae Kwon Do instructor to have an idea.

I blog here every day, but my blog here is incredibly personal. If it was known I ran it, I'd probably be barred from virtually every job in existence up to and including the potential for me to lose my current job. (I've been careful to avoid commenting on my job in here, but all the same, I have commented on it, and while I've done my best to keep the details from here, it's always possible that what I've said is still too much said.)

I listed blogging as a skill on my LinkedIn account all the same, though.
So...I want to run, not as a replacement, but as something concurrent to this blog, a daily blog that is professional, that is work-based, that is strictly about matters in regards to work, and to keep it going for one solid year, barring the usual vacation days.

It'd be a challenge, but I want to try for a self-inflicted test of my skills, to see if it can be done.

Really cold.

Like, I went into a shivering fit, cold.

Disappointingly, the temperature in the house which caused this?
69 degrees. I apparently inherited my father's genetics there, even though I like the cold better than the heat. (In short, my body handles the heat much, much, much easier than it handles the cold, but I don't like the heat and prefer the cold.)

To be fair, it's my own stupid fault. Instead of wearing my warmup jacket and pants, I was wearing only my shorts and my T-shirt, so the uncontrollable violent shivering I experienced woulda been easily dealt with by simply adding a layer on. (I've since put the pants on, but I'm still cold. Better than before, though!)

Anyway, my schedule has been a little bit...wacky. Yesterday, I mentioned how I woke up at 4:30. Well, I wanted to get at least 12 hours awake. So I did all the things I normally would: mafia stuff, a ComicFury visit, daily games, and then I went on to spend the rest of that time addicted to something.

A long time ago, even before I knew I was trans, I had heard of an interesting story, 1/2 Prince. I found the concept strangely attractive, and my desire for it only increased with time. Of course, there were multiple reasons why I never followed through. One, I thought it was still ongoing (and at the time, maybe it was) even though apparently it's not; it's pretty dang rare for me to read things that continuously update these days.

Two, I thought it was in light novel format only. And while it's true, the original is in fact a light novel, turns out there's a manhua of it that has the original author's approval. (This is what I'm currently reading, though I might reread the whole thing as the light novel when I finish!)

Three, I wasn't aware of high-quality translations being readily-available online, but...apparently, there are! (And from my understanding, these also have the full blessing of the original author.)

So, I didn't finish the whole thing in one go-through (that's 15 volumes!), but I did finish the first nine volumes last night. And by 'night', I mean, I went to bed at 7...
...AM.

I set a timer to wake up at 1:30, as to get myself back onto a more proper, usual schedule, so here I am, now at 2:30. Of course, I have Tae Kwon Do today, so I've only got an hour and a half of free time. (Less, when you account for me needing to eat lunch.)

Meaning, I need to find something to fill my time. I dare not try mafia; that's a recipe for me being late because there's more than an hour and a half's worth of work and the moment I'm idiotic enough to log in, my obsessions will compel me to finish it all. (I'll tackle that later tonight. We've got DWTS and Agents of Shield tonight, so I imagine there's no Chuck, but this still gets me available at 11 PM--later than preferred, but doable all the same.)

For that same reason, I dare not try to read 1/2 Prince. I stopped at Chapter 50 because I saw it was the start of a new volume, and it didn't stop the story on a cliff-hanger like many volumes before had. (I mean, there's a continuous story going on, so obviously I didn't get to see its conclusion, but this has the potential to drag on for a while. Personally, I'm predicting the current story is not even close to the final story, but it is theoretically possible that they drag that current story out over five volumes, meaning, that'd happen regardless of when I stopped.)

There's not much I can do about games.
But what I can do, is...be productive! And do things I'm supposed to be doing anyway, but have slacked off on. (You know me, this really shouldn't be a surprise.) For instance, the current page I'm working on in Red Hood Rider is easy; I should be able to tackle it in only a few hours and it's something I can easily stop on. Plus, I DO need to finish it soon, because I need to be doing at least one page a week. Minimum, not maximum! And my procrastination has sabotaged efforts to get my buffer up and running well in advance.

I could also do things like...you know, check my email.
Which I haven't done for a couple of weeks.

That's gonna be hell, but the longer I wait, the worse it'll get.

Still, all the same, and I say this with absolutely no fear of tempting fate: as long as I avoid the two traps of timesinks, there's no way that I can waste that much time. So, something​ will be done today, in some small amount.

My reaction?

Well, I was woken up by it, sure, but I wanted none of it.

So I went back to sleep and decided that I'd be woken up some time after it had ended.

And sure enough, I was.

At 4:30 PM.

That's right.

4:30 PM.
Is the time I got up.
And ate breakfast.

I mean, I coulda gotten up earlier, sure. But with the bad weather outside, I just felt like sleeping through it. Thunderstorms tend to lead to bad internet connections, and of course, risk of power outages. So in my state, I was basically like, "meh, why bother?", and so, I waited it out, asleep.

Led to a really interesting dream, though I can't recall the specifics of it. Had something to do with being a spy, though. In a sort-of Chuck kind of way.

We all deal with loss differently.
I apparently deal with it by going into depression and writing songs.
Or maybe I was already in depression, and the song just manifested today as a result.
But either way:

I didn't quite finish the song.
It's not about our cat, but I suspect I'll be writing one for her soon.

Here's what I got so far:

Love
Oh what a word it is
Love
Something made to live

There are two camps about it
And they're so divided
To show it every moment
Or only with specific timin'

Can we compromise
Is there a middle line
I vote yes and as for why
Here's an old belief of mine


I love you
The many ways
I love you
We do create
I love you
Such a thing to say
I love you
Each and every day.


Love
Oh what a word it is
Love
Something made to give

Be expressive of feelings
And in delivering
(And that's as far as I got)

Didn't get to complete the second verse, but after that, it'd be the chorus twice. Not a complex song, but lyrically-wise, it changes; the first paragraph of the verse is vastly different in timing than the second paragraph which has vastly different timing from the third paragraph which has vastly different timing from the chorus, so like in a song that has verses, a prechorus, a bridge, and a chorus, it has four different sections, it's just that one of those sections is a postchorus rather than prechorus, and there's effectively two different back-to-back verses rather than verses and a bridge. This is a format I see in some songs here and there, and I felt like writing a song like that, so I did. Mostly.

Didn't quite complete it, but got it close.
​Ah, well.

Today, our (and by our, I mean, my older sister's) 18-year-old cat died.
She went to the vet last Sunday.
She went to a different vet, her normal one, on Monday, where they discovered she had a bladder infection.
And later, it was discovered she additionally had a kidney infection.

Midway through the week, she was getting better.

But then she took a turn for the worse.

While my sister is the one most effected by this...this is something that influences me as well.

​So honestly, not in the mood to blog.

Sort-of. Last night, I told you about me finishing the first page, but what I didn't tell you is that, after that, I decided to get even more done. While I still need to work on the comic pages, I knocked out the comic's avatar. Here, have a look.

I mean, it's got flaws, yeah. It's not quite what I was hoping for, but hey, the final image goes down to 150 pixels, so all those imperfections you can see in there now, they are hidden fairly well. (Though, the obvious downside of that is the lovely details also fade. Oh well.)

So, Red Hood Rider work is progressing. I also messed around a little on the official site (don't worry, I still intend to upload on this blog as well!), so that was some further work done. Nothing much, just small things. I mostly made a to-do list which still holds true.

I quite like what I'm doing with...everything.

I've only got less than ten minutes to spare, so gotta be fast.
I did it.
I actually did it.
I. did. it.

I actually went to make something I like! It looks awesome, too! It's got...some flaws here and there, sure, yes. Little hiccups from my artistic limitations (among them, that I am still relatively speaking, a newish artist).
It took a fair amount of time.

But finally.

Ruby is alive!



...

...On one page.
One down, 22 to go.

Blame a recent episode of Chuck we watched for this. But basically, yeah, I'm talking about that sort of thing.
Now, to be blunt.
I don't believe that type of brainwashing even exists.
Even if it did, there are far more efficient, cheaper, subtler methods of brainwashing than those that shows and movies and whatnot would have you believe.

You need only look around you in your daily life: every form of media. Any religious text you follow. The foods you choose to eat. What type of job you have. What type of education you received. Where you live. Who you talk to. All of this and more is a form of brainwashing.

Now it's at about this time that you'd probably be writing me off as a crazy lunatic. There's precedence for this, after all. Any archive binger or long-time follower of my blog will see that I am a really crazy person with some outlandish outlooks on life, and are probably ready to write this off as just another one of those. And to be fair, they're not exactly wrong, but give me some credit here, please! Just listen for a sec.

This belief of mine isn't because I'm some crazy conspiracy theorist. It's because to me, you need to consider what the term brainwashing actually means, and what it means is, essentially, "social conditioning that is not natural", basically. That was me just guessing, but looking it up, the dictionary definition isn't too far off the mark: "make (someone) adopt radically different beliefs by using systematic and often forcible pressure".

So they include "forcible" in there. Eh, I somewhat disagree; it can be forced in that they have no viable options, but doesn't require it. I do agree that it's systematic, though. Basically, brainwashing, forced social conditioning, if you will, is something literally every civilized human being undergoes.

Why?

...Because forced social conditioning is inherent to the idea of civilization itself. While humans are tribal creatures by our very nature, this "loyalty" to our tribe naturally only extends so far. We mostly would, left to our own devices, mostly fend for ourselves, and only use others when we're faced with a task we can't conquer alone. That's a little bit of a cynical outlook on life, but that's literally every communal species' evolution process over millions, even billions, of years. That "primal" level of thinking is what life started as.

And anything other than that is a divergence from it. The whole, "top brain, lower brain" thing which you see every once and a while out there. Now, I don't know how valid it actually is, but it does at least hold appeal to my own personal belief in things, that there's a difference between our active, conscious minds and our more instinctive, primal, inactive side. (But that's a subject for an entirely different ramble.)

And over the millennia, tribes coalescing have been cultivating our very nature as human beings. One religion, to unite the people: if everyone holds to these set beliefs, then everyone will feel connected to them. One nation, to unite the people: if everyone feels like they're part of one gigantic tribe, then they are less likely to cause trouble with their neighbors and more likely to help out in times of need.

You see where I'm going with this, right? That brainwashing has been part of what has allowed humans to evolve in the first place. In other words, we lied to ourselves...and when we started believing our own lies, they started to work, and became true. Power of belief, personified. So! From where I stand, I don't believe brainwashing is inherently bad. It's not inherently good, quite obviously. You can be conditioned into doing some really nasty stuff, in a HORRIFICALLY short period of time. Plenty of psyche experiments have proven this much. But it's also not something inherently bad, either; it's just...a part of our lives.

Something which we have effect us every day, without even realizing it. And governments are generally really good at subtly manipulating these factors to make a populace serve their agenda. Want to make the nation go to war? Get the people very mad, so that they are willing to go to war.

Now, I do believe it's been conclusively shown that at least once, this happened, with FDR's administration having known the Japanese were going to attack and also having been partially manipulating things such that the Japanese felt they had no choice but to attack, but even if it hasn't, even if I am mistaken about that, if given the absolute benefit of the doubt of being ignorant about attacks against the US, there's no mistaken what can happen in response to these attacks: media will cover the attack(s) in excruciating detail, making sure the entire nation knows just how atrocious and despicable this enemy was for daring to attack the peaceful, harmless, Americans, and they will DEMAND response, even retribution, for the tragedy.

Of course, the events are in fact terrible. I mean that in sincerity, naturally. They shouldn't have happened, but did anyway. Yet it's undeniable that, time and time again, across the last 100 years, this has been how the US has responded: they felt suffering, and felt personally hurt, as a nation (a grand tribe), so they declared war.

It's really easy once you know how to get people on your side, especially with media control. You need only look at wars like Vietnam and the second Gulf War to see how the populace's opinion shifts with the power of media. Government controlling the media can censor how hellish war is. When the secret leaks out about the suffering of troops, the very thing which riled us up in the first place (outrage at our suffering) turns against them, with demands to bring our troops back home.

It's just one example of many, in how the government can influence us. Corporations have an equal number of dirty tricks up their sleeve to ensure you're addicted to their services, what they provide. In many cases, even if you use a competitor's services, they still win because you're using the service rather than using something else which neither in the duopoly would want. (This still applies even if there's more than two companies in play, just to a lesser extent.)

The amount of the populace which can rely entirely on themselves, be completely self-sufficient, is pathetically small. And for those that need help, the vast majority of them don't need help from neighbors. They need help from those companies out there.

Again, this view might seem a bit cynical, but it's actually just me being realistic. That's how our world is. It's how our world works now. That social conditioning has been forced into us for so long that we can no longer live without it, realistically speaking. And is this a bad thing? I don't think so. It's just a thing. So I'm not complaining, or anything. I certainly don't have any ideas on what would make the world better! It's not perfect. It could use improvement. But we've used it for so long that we've adapted, adjusted, to it such that it works well enough and I'm okay with that.

Doesn't mean it's any less brainwashing, though.
...Okay. So maybe I am a liiiiiiiittle bit crazy even with the above. My perspective is never going to be perfect, especially given that I don't bother to research these subjects. I mostly just view them from feel, and the above makes sense to me as being how things are.

But would you believe I'm only at the half-way point in my ramble?

Because another thing the series Chuck makes me think about is spies, in general.
I imagine that in real life, real spies probably only go on something like 2-3 missions over the course of their career. This is just me guessing. Obviously, spies being, well, spies, this sort of information isn't exactly something governments would just be willy-nilly open about.

But three factors contribute to my low figure in comparison to literally every spy show/film ever:
One is the danger associated with the assignment. A spy in a high-risk field is...in a high-risk field. Let's say you're a spy in a warzone. Any moment, you could be killed, be it by a friend or a foe. Or let's say you're a spy in, saaaaaaaaaay, the mafia. Any moment, you could be exposed and killed, or any moment, you could be killed by some form of gang rivalry. I don't imagine people in this line of work exactly have the longest longevity while on duty.
Plus, there's always the risk that if your cover is exposed, you can't be extracted and hidden fast enough, with you being tracked down/killed before you are put under protection.

A related, albeit slightly less likely in the modern world where such charges I imagine aren't so common, possibility is that if you're a spy in another government, when caught, you could be charged with treason and executed. This would probably be a political nightmare in the current world, but I guess it could still happen in some countries.

The second factor is the longevity of the assignment. It takes time to build an effective cover. You can't just materialize out of nowhere and expect it to work. I mean, to some extent, this depends on how good governments are at planting false records: media would have us believe they can do so nigh-flawlessly, but whether that's an exaggeration or not, only the people in the business would know. But I imagine regardless of whether they can or can't, it's much easier to build up a false identity over time than it is to build up a false identity instantly.

Furthermore, these assignments can be long-term. Sleeper agents are something we generally associate with fiction, but they exist in real life, on both sides, with things like spies who were in the US for twenty years waiting activation. If one assignment lasts that long, how many can a spy realistically go on over their lifetime?

And the third factor is in familiarity. This one, spy shows actually occasionally touch upon, albeit rarely. If you're constantly out in the field carrying out missions...well, it won't take too long before people begin to recognize you. You can do a lot to disguise yourself: alter your voice, alter your appearance, use padding to alter your body build and height, but there's only so many tricks you can use before using tricks becomes a hazard. (No matter the strength of the disguise, there are just as many ways to expose one as there are of creating one, and chances are, if you're spying on someone, the person you're spying on is likely to be paranoid they're being spied on and will attempt countermeasures.) So, the only way to efficiently ensure you're not recognized, not spotted, is to change locations of assignment in some combination with disguises, and further make sure you can't encounter the same people.

And, I imagine, the risk of encountering someone goes up the more missions you'd go on, because I'll stick to my non-cynical view that real-life spies are not going to be constantly assassinating person after person after person and thus, they let live plenty of people who can and will recognize them.

Buuuuuuuuuuuuut, all the same, in spite of my belief above that real-life spies probably operate something more like the above, subtly rather than so overtly, all the same, I can't help but enjoy shows like Chuck, and films like Bond, for one simple reason:

Spies, as displayed, are a lot like a game of mafia.
They require the exact same set of skills, if you think about it: they may be briefed on the situation at hand, depending on how good their information is. (How "open" the setup is, and their alignment going into it.) They will have a set assignment with a set goal (their wincon), even if they're not entirely sure of the specifics. And upon the start of the assignment, they have to employ mad improvisation skills.

There's a trope that all spy shows/films use, called Bavarian Fire Drill. You'd know it as the one where they act like they belong in the place they are, and so, nobody suspects them. They just walk in with confidence, can even change outfits, and as long as they give the aura of belonging in the role they are playing, nobody will question them.

And while this is clearly an exaggeration, it has basis in fact and is seen in every game of mafia: players will try to figure things out, and the mafia/werewolves will act like they belong even though they know they don't. Then, you enter into the stage of spy films/shows, where the spy faces people and must interact with them in detail. Here, they cannot use a facade.

Just like in games, where players interact with each other. So, the spy must combine three factors: the lie they are currently putting themselves in, a touch of their real life to add believability to their story, and a psychological profile of who they are talking to (which they must form on the spot), in order to tailor their story to the target, as to receive the information they are after.

Regardless of how realistic that may be, I love it because it's a perfect comparison to mafia games, since in a mafia game, both sides will do this. The mafia will tell the lie they are town, interlaced with their natural persona to add believability, while psychologically profiling the other players and tailoring select ones to their side while eliminating those that they deem less controllable.

In contrast, the town players will know the role they are living is legit, though they still add in their own persona (a piece of their life) because it's impossible not to. They psychologically profile players they are talking to, but in their case, they're looking for something being "off": they are looking for the 'spy', who has infiltrated their ranks, someone whose profile doesn't seem to add up.

It's a game of information and deceit, the staples of the spy genre, with the touch of psychology that many spy films and shows touch on (even if they don't know they've touched on them), so is it any wonder I enjoy them?

As you may be able to ascertain, for those reading this blog on later dates: the entry listed first, "didn't do art today", was posted second, after the "weebly's being glitchy" blog post was, because...
...Well...

...Weebly was being glitchy, natch.
Soyeah. While they were written in the order of glitchy-art-clarity, the blog posts for today ended up getting posted as art-glitchy-clarity.