And while I know there is quite a bit of risk in me extrapolating on my thoughts down this avenue (seriously you have no idea how worried I am that this blog post could get me banned from sites or like have a cop knock on my door), I feel like the reward is worth it.

Basically. My detractors may have the impression I think I'm the greatest, but. I really don't. Sure, I have delusions of grandeur, I put up a facade of confidence all the time, and even get genuinely arrogant. So I'll be the first to confess there are times when I, genuinely, fool myself into thinking I'm a good person.

But whenever I'm actually honest with myself and reflect...I know I'm not. I'll talk about things I've done, thoughts I've had, perspectives I hold, but even when I try to explain why I'm a monster, I avoid actually revealing the things which make me one, because I don't want them to be known. (And frankly I could potentially even ruin my life by revealing some of them.)

Even in this blog post, right here and now, I am doing precisely that. I'm not going into what makes me a monster. I'm barely even teasing it. My statement that I am one sounds like it's empty, because I don't back it up. And people may think I exaggerate, as is my wont. People may think that what I think is monstrous of me is something completely normal. They would be wrong, because if they actually knew, they'd agree, yeah, it's monstrous.

But because I don't tell them, they assume the like of that. Thinking I'm not possibly that bad even though if anything I'm worse than I indicate. To give the tip of the iceberg, and I hesitate to even describe it that way because this makes people severely underestimate the extent of how disturbed I am, I wanted to talk about something.

What I'm about to describe, I feel would not so much as even scratch the surface of my inner monstrosity. (I've made it quite clear in the past that all of my mes, all of the me that makes me me, is afraid of that inner monstrosity, and for good reason given what it can do and my fear knowing it can and would do that.)

The evil within me can be, on occasions, channeled into good, but the evils were evils I immersed myself in willingly, with no such altruistic goal; I had no expectation of turning the evil into good, and doing so can be thought of as simply not letting lemons go to waste and making lemonade from them. It's still evil regardless, unambiguously so.

How bad am I talking?

To reiterate: everything I am about to describe. EVERY. SINGLE. THING. I am about to tell you. I don't consider monstrous. So after reading the entirety of this blog post and seeing every single thing I describe and knowing not a single one I consider to be monstrous, you should be left with a question:
"If she didn't consider any of THIS monstrous, what does she consider monstrous?"
(The answer is not some philosophical trivial BS nonsense which is completely fine with everyone else, by the way, nor is it some quirk that literally everyone has. It is actual real monstrous things, but the darkest parts of my mind I keep private from others and won't ever explain on a blog.)

Before we begin, though. This is a necessity:
TRIGGER WARNING: THE ENTIRE REST OF THIS BLOG DEALS WITH TORTURE AND MAY TOUCH ON GORE AND RAPE, AMONG OTHERS. Viewer beware!

You've been warned, so you know what you're in for here; it's...not gonna be pleasant.

​Torture is something I think about alarmingly often, and not in the more lighthearted ways. What I mean by that is, I'm not talking about BDSM here because that is in no way shape or form torture; I am also not thinking about torture in the clinical, scientific, detached, theoretical sense of it.

You know. Think about how someone can be a buff for a subject. Science buff. History buff. Gun buff. Knife nut. You get the idea. They can hold fascination over the history of the subject throughout the ages, and know details about it from various regions and points in time, and go on long, passionate rants about, saaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyy, the gory details of how the Aztecs would sacrifice a human being.

But they do that in a way which is self-evidently healthy and light; they're not into those things because they derive some form of recreating these things. Their interest can be thought of as trivial. They dig into the facts about those things as a side-project, as a hobby, as a passion, as a passing interest which they can be enthusiastic about, but they don't really go beyond that.

My interest in torture is not of that kind.
My torture is of the more thorough, deeper kind. I absolutely was the kind of kid that tortured all forms of life as a child. I probably left lifelong psychological damage on one of our first pets from what I did to her; I would squish ants, tried burning them with the magnifying glass trick, and would relentlessly brutalize plants in just about every way possible.

And while I eventually did swear off those ways and promised to be pacifistic, in spite of that, on some level I did shift gears from plants and animals onto humans. Where the unhealthy, darker sides of torture would be. The type of thought where it'd be, "This is how to go about it, and this is what to do to not get caught", kind of thinking.

(Disclaimer: Due to just how vividly and detailed I am in these descriptions, I feel the need to state beforehand: in case you are wondering. No. I haven't actually tortured anyone. Nor have I looked up/researched torture. But these are a collection on my thoughts on the hypotheticals behind if I did do it. I state these with a viewpoint which sounds confident and assured, that what I say is fact. That viewpoint comes from a lifetime of demented thoughts, thoughts not acted upon but which were thought up all the same. This is the darker side of having an overreactive imagination; by having the ability to envision even the most twisted of things, I am able to do...well. Just keep reading. THAT.)

People can and have called me psychopathic and/or sociopathic for my more sadistic tendencies, and frankly I don't really blame them for doing so, given my selfishness and detachment from reality and utter disregard for the rules of society and so on and so forth.

Yet to go into torture, really go into it, you have to start with a few baselines for what I actually mean by torture, here.

You can think of torture in terms of attempting to obtain pieces of information. Not only is torture proven ineffective in this regard, but also there are more reliable ways of obtaining such information. I don't really see torture as viable to this means, and this type of torture is not what I mean.

You can think of torture in terms of deriving pleasure from the inflicted suffering of others. This is closer to what I mean, where the torturer is enjoying the act of the torture more than anything else, but this isn't quite what I mean, either. There's plenty of ways to derive pleasure from the suffering of others that don't involve torture.

​What I more mean about torture is, what you can think of in terms as being "torture for the sake of torture". Torture for the sake of tormentation. Not expecting to get pleasure, not expecting to get anything out of it. The torture here is zero gain. There is nothing to be had from it. Only pain of the victim.

In other words: inflicting suffering, just to inflict the suffering. To drag others down, not to raise yourself up, but simply just to drag them down. Something transcending a sense of sadism, as it were. This is where I approach torture from, so that should give you a good idea of where I'm coming from, if you can comprehend this concept as an actual real thing. (And I'm telling you it very much is one...at least for me.)

​I've even thought about what would ultimately be one of the most excruciatingly slow, painful methods, which I call the "Hundred Permanent Paths of Pain". (Name is a bit of a misnomer, because there's not literally 100 pains involved. There's more.)

The first step in it would be to break every bone you can safely break without killing the victim. Hands, arms, legs, feet, ribs, the like; we have hundreds of bones in our body. Not all can safely be broken without risking, say, internal bleeding, but a fair number are safe to break. Keep in mind that bones can also be broken in multiple locations if big enough, and that inflicts even more suffering.

That's just the start though. From there, pull out all 20 fingernails and toenails. Rip them out of their sockets. And then, cut off the top third of each finger and toe. Then the middle third. Then the bottom third. (Each finger and each toe--even our thumbs, even our pinkies, even our big toes--has three distinct sections. These sections are harder to see in some of those extremities than others, but exist all the same.)

For all of these cut off parts, cauterization (which is extra pain) can be applied as is necessary to stop the victim from bleeding out. We're at 81 (if you count bones collectively as 1) paths of pain thusfar; the next logical step is to cut off the hands at the wrists, then the feet at the ankles. Then, cut off the arms at the elbows, and legs at the knees. And then, the arms at the shoulders, and legs at the hips. Which bumps it up to 93.

At which point, there's a bunch on the face.
Ears, 95.
Eyes, 97.
Tongue, 98.
And then you can pull out each and every single tooth they have.

The tongue and teeth come last for the purposes of hearing unmuffled screaming.

This level of agony would of course be instantly lethal if given all at once, so would be delivered over the course of days, if not weeks. And if their forcefully-blind/deaf/mute-paraplegic state isn't enough, there's always whipping their torso and hanging their neck but not enough to kill them for bonus extras (that can technically be done again and again at any time).

Step by step, the permanent paths of pain would be...well. Permanent damage. Starting out with things that can heal even if unlikely to heal correctly, and then moving on to things that won't heal but can be adapted to, and progressively on to more and more debilitating injuries, worse and worse as it goes along with the exception of the facial ones that are technically less severe, but are more psychologically scarring.

Which is a nice segue into the next section of defining torture to me.

All of the above? Absolutely nothing to me. Because while the above does hold some psychological aspects to it, it is almost entirely physically-based induced suffering. And for me, psychological pain is the true heart of where torture lies. You can inflict endless amounts of pain, but if it's physical, it's temporary. Psychological pain, on the other hand, isn't.

​This is one of the reasons, say, rape is such a special kind of evil. (I'll try to keep my talk here light and respectful, but I do consider it to be a form of torture of sorts, so I feel I need to at least mention it. And, yes, it is in fact monstrous, so ignore my "everything I say below I don't consider monstrous" line above when it comes to this section.) There is the obvious immediate physiological damage, but the psychological scarring from rape lasts a lifetime. 

Especially if after it, the victim suffers further from others: not being believed, being called names like whore, slut, and the like, victim blaming, and in a disturbingly large number of cases absolute lack of closure as the rapist walks away without any lasting consequences for whatever reason.

Even if the victim does receive a form of vindication/justice and has some amount of closure, there will always be some reminders of the incident that they can never fully remove from their minds; it will last a lifetime and never go away. They can find ways to cope, they can find ways to recover, but they'll never fully heal, because the psychological damage lasts well after the physical damage has passed.

It is perhaps one of the more extreme examples and in our every day life/the absolutely craptastic world we live in one of the most common examples of torture (sad as that may be, it's simply the facts; it happens, and pretending it doesn't won't change that it does, and is there a LOT), but I could name any number of other tortures akin to this.

For me, torture can be thought of as a performance art, subject to the whims of the audience (in this case, the audience is the victim): the key to making it be successful is to find the audience's trigger points, and figure out what works to psyche them, what gets them to react in the ways you are hoping to make them react.

Because, the real key to torture, is to never let the victim go numb. When a person is past their breaking point, they'll numb the pain. Pain will be meaningless to them. And when pain is meaningless to them, it ceases to be torturous, because it no longer has any affect on the victim.

So you rotate the torture. You give variety, introduce new hells one after another. And you give things which, preferably, can never be adapted to. Many psychological sufferings can eventually be coped with; a skilled torturer who really knows how to torment their victim will inflict psychological scarring that no matter how long it goes on for, will never be something they can adjust to.

The majority of my most disturbing imagery will end here, but I still wouldn't say the rest of this blog is safe to read, because I'm starting out with describing the ultimate torture someone could inflict on me. (One of the few redeeming aspects of these thoughts? I had them with me as the guinea pig in them. I didn't envision me inflicting the hundred permanent paths of pain on another; I envisioned them being done to me. But that still doesn't change how disturbing they are.)

The ultimate torture that someone could inflict on me is what I call "The Metal Box".
It is exactly that, a metal box, about three times the height (and thus, width and length, as this is a perfect cube) of the prisoner contained within. The walls absorb sound, so no sound from outside enters; no sound from inside echos. As the name indicates, the walls are also a cold metal.

You might think that the metal box would have no lighting, or dim lighting. Quite the opposite, the lighting within is equivalent to that of the sun (give or take), with light shining from all six directions. Not from a single location, either; the light is spread out across the entirety of the walls, floor, and ceiling, as if the very metal itself were the light itself.

There would be a small hole in one wall for a toilet, but not a hole large enough to climb through. So small a hole, in fact, that it can barely fit the contents you are dumping into it. It's just big enough that you won't die of disease as a result of poor sanitation, but offers no escape, no entertainment (it's not like a flushable toilet with a toilet seat that you can lift and lower for entertainment or a handle to flush for entertainment or tools you can use to escape). Pure baseline functionality.

There would be a water dispenser, designed similarly to that of those used for rodent pets like a hamster, such that you only receive the amount of water you need to survive, no more; it's impossible to drown yourself when you become more suicidal. It's also impossible to break it down into tools to orchestrate an escape.

Meals are delivered at random varying intervals, anywhere from as little as one hour apart to as much as two weeks apart. There is no pattern to these meals; there is no rhyme, no reason, to them. They come when they come, and don't come when they don't come.

Said meals are delivered with no tray, no plate, no silverware, nothing but the food itself, and are dumped in such a way that it's impossible to see anyone delivering the food. It just goes in, and that's it.

The metal box is, other than these features and the presence of the prisoner within...completely and entirely empty. Nothing inside it. Whatsoever. Except the prisoner, and the necessary means to keep the prisoner alive and functioning. With no way for the prisoner to derive entertainment from those necessities, and no escape route. Trapped in a metal box of a room, utterly empty.

The end result of this would be losing all sense of time, trapped with the worst enemy of all: my own mind. My own mind is my absolute worst enemy. I function because I have an outlet for it. I wrote down this blog at work; that's an outlet. When I post it as a blog, that's an outlet.

But what if I were, permanently rather than temporarily, deprived of all outlets...yet not having my ability to think dimmed, dulled, or numbed in any way, shape, or form? What if my overreactive imagination and relatively speaking fairly sharp senses were left to run amok, unchecked, ungated?

I fidget with objects to distract myself. I do things all the time to distract myself. But I always need something, anything, to focus on, because if I have nothing to focus on my brain explodes in activity, and when it has that type of outburst, nothing can stop me from just being in agony.

I need to move. But in such an environment, I would be unable to move. I could pace back and forth, but eventually my body would tire and I'd be forced to stay in one spot. As pacing helps me channel my energy, once I was no longer able to do so out of sheer exhaustion, I'd be at my wit's ends. Because I'd have all this energy, all this mental energy, accumulating, as if a bomb ready to explode...yet it couldn't be released.

That would be the truest, greatest of hells someone could inflict on me. Highly immoral, sure, but that's a given for torture since, y'know. Torture isn't exactly ethical, now, is it? Also highly illegal, mind you. But scarily enough, not all too far off of real world jails in some parts (for instance, isolation), which mind you is a contributing factor to why I want to always be a law-abiding citizen and never need to go to jail.

I simply couldn't survive in there, because the things I would need to survive are the very same things they would absolutely forbid me from having. Pencil and paper to write down thoughts? Way, way, way, WAY too dangerous. Laptop to type up thoughts? Probably even more dangerous! I'd no joke if a thought hit me that was that important, would write it down in blood, which I'm quite sure would make my living situation even worse.

What I'm getting at there is that I need an outlet. I absolutely need a way to vent, a way to express myself, a way to give my thoughts, to give my mind away in an external factor, even if it is something stupidly simple. And not doing so would be torture. Psychologically scarring, driving me insane.

So that's what I mean when I say I can think of no greater torture someone could inflict on me than that. But...I have a small confession to make:
In spite of what I just said. It's not quite fully accurate. While it's true that The Metal Box is the worst torture which someone could inflict on me, an aspect of it would actually give me respite from the TRUE ultimate torture...one which nobody can inflict on me.

That of the hell of my life, due to what can never change in it.

There are many, many, many things that people can change in their lives. It's not exactly true, but in general it can probably be said that the more things someone can change, the more privileged they are. An old story my dad used to tell me comes to mind.

There were two men.

One man kept making wrong choice after wrong choice.
The other, right choice after right choice.

As the man who kept making right choices went on in life, more and more choices opened up to him.
As the man who made wrong choices went on in life, fewer and fewer choices were available, until only two were available: death by (one method I don't remember), or death by (a different method I don't remember).

I'm horribly, horrendously butchering that story since it's been like 15, 18 years since I last heard it, but it's related to what I'm talking about here.

If you are in a position where you have the luxury of choice, you can change many, many things. The better off you are, the more you can change; the worse off you are, the less you can change. Now, even if you are worse off, you can still make changes, but your chance to make change and your opportunities to make the change are going to be more limited than if you were better off; that's just self-evident, that a poor situation/circumstances leads to less available chances to create good ones, whereas good situations/circumstances lead to more available chances.

Anyone can climb the latter in theory, but those who are already higher up on the latter have better shots at climbing the latter further than those who start from the bottom. That's just the world we live in. I don't feel I'm being cynical in stating that, either. It's real. Should it be that way, no. (I could probably go on endlessly on a tangent about equality, equity, and so on and so forth but I won't.) But it is that way.

And why I'm saying that is...

...I hold an incredible privilege, because I am already quite high up on the ladder. Not incredibly high, but middle class. (Not sure where on middle, if it's upper, lower, or right in the middle, but it's middle class undeniably.) We have debts; we have the need to monitor money; we have a bunch of things we have to watch out for that upper class people take for granted, but we also have things like 1.5 cars per person in a six-person family, about that same number of computers, a TV in both bedrooms as well as the living room, at least two PS1s, at least three PS2s, at least two PS3s, at least one PS4, an XBox 360, a Wii, numerous DVD/Bluray players, half a dozen gameboys and gameboy advances, plus the things which make use of these (movies, shows, games) in the hundreds.

If my parents had had only one or two kids with no pets (we've had two dogs, four cats, countless fish, two mice, and a hamster as pets off the top of my head and pets are ludicrously expensive to raise and keep in good health; saving our 14-year-old cat when he was a kitten cost at least $3,000 when he swallowed too much strong), then they would undeniably be upper class. (Especially since my brother is the only sibling of us three to really make any actual money.)

We're poorer than that because of said pets and extra kids (mind you, neither myself nor my younger sister were planned; we're both accidents so the aforementioned two-children scenario almost did happen), but what I am getting at here is...that's still incredibly well-off, all things considered.

I have a lot of things that are good in my life. I have warm shelter every day, due to having a house to live in. I have safe, reliable, consistent, quick, reasonably cheap transportation. I have a steady job (albeit minimum wage). I have a neverending supply of food, and more than that, the luxury of choice in what to eat. (I can't even begin to fathom how much of a privilege that is, in spite of knowing just full good and well exactly how much it is indeed a luxury!)

I have a constant supply of water, albeit due to no city water access not quite unlimited. (We have a well. And live in Western Washington. I need say no more than 'western Washington' for 'endless water' to come across.) As indicated above, I have multiple sources of entertainment available to me at any time.

I even have a girlfriend!

​I am in a position which, objectively speaking, is awesome to be in. People would quite literally KILL to have what I have.

Yet this creates torture.

Because while there are so many things I can change.
Because while due to having all of that, I have so many opportunities, so many chances to change.
What eats me up inside is that the things I most want to change.
Are the things which can't change.

There are plenty of things which can change, and my position affords me almost unlimited access to pretty much all of those; I have at my disposal endless numbers of decisions which can lead to countless numbers of possible paths, good or bad. I can change my life in those ways, with the potential to make it better!

But the ways I can change my life, be it for the better or for the worse, are the ways I don't care about changing.
The ways I can't change are the ones that I want to change.

And therein lies the suffering, the torturous part of it.

Because what I can change isn't what I want to change. I am shown, every day, with my privileges. "All of this is things you can do." Yet I am shown, by that, "You can make change"...except in the areas I want to make change.

There's hell to be had in my every day life because of that duality.

​No matter what I do, I can't change some things, even if I really want to. I have a female mind, born into a body that is biologically male. That can't change, no matter what. I could suffer a form of death. Pretend I'm just a guy for the rest of my life and hope, PRAY, that if I tell that lie to myself for long enough, that if I consistently sell the same story, that eventually it'll be real.

That's not changing it though. That's denying it. That's a refusal of reality. That's rejecting reality, and going down a road that nobody should go down, least of all someone like me since going down that road leads only to misery and suffering not just for me but potentially for others as well.

Technological advancements are an amazing thing; there's HRT and GRS or whatever name it goes by. But while those are good, they aren't perfect. The technology to make a body born biologically male 100% absolutely indistinguishable from a body born biologically female doesn't exist yet.

We're getting closer every day to it existing, but it doesn't exist now. That's no excuse of course not to use the existing technology, which I fully do intend to use...but even our existing technology is ludicrously expensive; to fully transition will cost me $100,000 or so, give or take.

In other words. No matter what I do. Regardless of the situation. I can't change who or what I am. I can't change that circumstance. I can get good at masking it; fully transitioning will help me cope with it. But nothing can change it, well and truly change it. At least not with our current technology. (Who knows what the future holds, in ten, twenty, fifty years it very well just might, but right now, no such luck.)

I am also autistic. This is not as obvious a tormentation as being a transwoman can be, but it is not without woes. This is also a mixed blessing/curse, in that there is some genuine good to come from my autism, from my ability to pick up on nuances, increased pattern recognition, and vastly boosted creativity, among other gifts.

But there are also some tremendous downsides to autism.

I will never be able to communicate as I want to.

I can try.

And I do try!

Every day, I try to get better at communicating.

But no matter how hard I try, I am hardwired to the very core to think in a way which is just different from other people, and that difference is difficult to live with. I can never convey my intended meaning as effectively as I want to. Even in words, it's difficult. I ramble. I make gigantic wallposts that nobody reads. In person, it's outright impossible.

​I can't change that. So it's torture. I can cope with it; I live with it every day, so I've adjusted to it. But I still don't like it. I don't like not being able to tell people what I mean and have them understand. I don't like my increased vulnerability to not understanding what others mean. I don't like people altogether skipping what I say.

I don't like those things, but no matter how much I try to change them. The best I can do is develop workarounds. I can turn weaknesses into aspects of strength, to exploit the most out of things. But I can never cure it altogether. I can never change it. I can try to make it work, but it'll always be a part of me that I wish was better than it is, because it is something I simply can't overcome because it's impossible to truly grasp.

I am bipolar. This is more obvious a tormentation in some ways, because the torture is something which people can generally at least grasp the concept of, but they might not understand just how bad it can be. Impulses are very, very, very nasty things. Most people have good control over their impulses. As I'm bipolar, I am forever vulnerable to succumbing to them.

Now this is all fine and dandy if the impulses are innocent enough, and good can come from being impulsive. I took track on an impulse. I took cross country on an impulse. I decided on swimming over wrestling (which my mom actually favored) on an impulse. I went to the same lifeguard training my sister did, on an impulse. And from those series of impulses which are a direct line (swimming came from needing a bridge between cross country and track, meaning without crosscountry, there wouldn't be swimming; with no swimming, there's no lifeguarding), you get me eventually getting a job.

But most impulses aren't innocent. Impulse buying is a go-to example, but I always live in constant fear that the darker half of my brain I suppress holds the full potential to, via impulses, enact those darker thoughts. I told you in the earlier disclaimer that I'd never tortured a person before, but no matter how unlikely it may seem to you--and believe me, it's quite unlikely because I've forced myself to set up dozens of safeguards--I am always living in fear of myself succumbing to an impulse which could lead to an event like torturing someone.

Do you know how scary it is to always be afraid of what you fear you're capable of doing? Impulses can lead to me hurting someone. In fact, they have. Not deliberately, of course. But they have hurt people before, and quite severely hurt them at that. Mostly online, mind you. And years ago when I was a kid fairly new all things considered to the internet. In the dark times, of the 2010 range for me (give or take a year).

The hurt I inflicted on them will never go away. It was accidental, yes, but it still happened, and it was because of poor impulse control more than anything else. (Autism may have played a part in me not realizing what had happened until it was too late, but that's ultimately not important what caused the hurt; what's important is that the hurt happened.)

Impulses aren't even the torturous part, though. I live in fear of impulses letting loose the monster within me, but I fear that knowing it to be an incredibly unlikely scenario. (I doubt that, short of some extreme trauma severely negatively impacting my psyche, it will ever come to reality. Still doesn't stop the fear though.)

The real bitch about the manic half of my depression is that when combined with my autism allowing me to sense things and connect random things. My brain is in constant overdrive, the overreactive imagination I mentioned earlier. How's it feel to have something within you, which makes you feel like your chest/brain is going to explode? It's maddening.

It's useful! It is incredibly useful for my creative efforts. But it is so overpowering that when I wave of mania hits me, I can do nothing but succumb to it. I can't do anything other than try to release the energy pent up within me, and this can and does lead to the aforementioned poor impulse control, too.

There's more to bipolar disorder than the manic half, though. The depression half of it, the low of it, is crippling. It can kill my drive altogether. It is, singlehandedly, the reason I haven't made anything of my life. At this point, probably having had high hundreds of thousands if not even millions of story/game/etc. ideas.

Not one has made it to reality.

Not. a. single. one.

To some extent, yes, the mania half is to blame because I can't focus on one if my mind is entirely on a new, different one.

But even if I am entirely focused on an idea.

If depression is running its course.

I can't do a thing.

I just shut down.

I do nothing.

I waste time, and make no effort.

And the worst part is, this can not only happen randomly, but also be induced by the slightest of causes. If I have reason to feel down, then I can enter depression no matter how minor the reason (it can be as little as a bad work day), and once in, I'm not leaving in a timely fashion (say a bad work day happened and I get depressed; it's not magically healed the next day).

The depression has its uses, yes, in that the time down is time which I've managed to turn into an artform, sometimes quite literally.

But I still don't take it well.

​Not even going into, counterintuitive as it may seem, how depression and mania can coexist simultaneously. Specifically, the danger there is combining depression bad enough to get suicidal with mania's poor impulse control; you can understand, then, exactly why that is an ugly, dangerous, combination to exist but it is perfectly plausible.

Again, I've put in safeguards to prevent it. Numerous ones. Failsafes for the failsafe's failsafe, levels of safeguarding. But all of this. Every single bit of the bipolar disorder countermeasures. Is just coping with it. It never changes that I have it.

I can make use of it; there is good to be had from it, as I have outlined.
But there is also a great many downsides to it, and no matter how much I want to change it so that I don't have those downsides.
I have those downsides.
They won't go away, no matter what. There is no magic pill to make my mind all better; it is permanently messed up, because I was born with these neurological conditions.

And the downsides of them stack.

Because the downsides of them stack.

Every day.

In spite of having the power to change.
I know that they won't change, because the ability to change doesn't mean that anything can change.
I can only change the things it is possible to change; the way my brain has been wired since birth is not a thing that can change.

You can slightly alter it. Coping mechanisms. Workarounds. But the fundamental nature of it remains the same.

So while I can get closer to being allowed to be the me I want to be. I'll never have everything I actually want.

And because of that.
That creates my torture.

I shouldn't be in a position to complain about a hellish life, because I have things which SHOULD lead to a happy, fulfilling life. And I do in fact, genuinely, feel happiness, each and every single day!

So maybe you can then understand the torture of HAVING THESE THINGS, KNOWING THEY ARE AWESOME, YET FEELING TORTURED IN SPITE OF POSSESSING THEM. Having them makes the torture in many ways worse, especially when I am told, "You have those things, why are you saying your life is hell?"

​When I have things others want above all else, how can I tell them I don't want those things? That what they consider a cherished gift is worthless to me? That what I have is their dream, yet I'm deliberately wasting it? That I don't care about the things I take for granted they want.

When I have no RIGHT to complain...what's it mean when I DO? Knowing I got good, yet I don't appreciate it. So luxurious, so nothing to complain about...yet I do ANYWAY. I know that my feelings on the subject hurt them...but I can't stop myself from having those feelings.

I can pretend I don't feel that way, that I appreciate the things I ought to appreciate, but it's still a lie. The simple truth of the matter is that I don't care about anything I have other than my girlfriend. (Incidentally. Caring about nothing in my life except my girlfriend is, in fact. Reason I would leave everything for them. Because I don't care about those things; I care about them, my girlfriend. Because I care for my girlfriend but not any part of my life, I would thus sacrifice any and every part of my life for the sake of my girlfriend. But I digress.)

​In other words. I know I am privileged, yet with the sole exception of my girlfriend nothing I have I really feel helps, making the torture worse. The torture is mental, psychological, in nature, continuously ongoing. It never ends. There's never a break in it. Never a chance for me to get a rest from my weaknesses.

They are always there, always a fundamental part of me, constantly reminding me of what I'll never have, what I'll never obtain, no matter how much I dream of having those things. All of that? Things which, by having, I "SHOULDN'T" be tortured, so because I know I shouldn't feel tortured, make the torture I feel all the more worse because in spite of having those things I still am tortured?

It's the worst pain I can possibly have. I don't feel I have the right to complain. I don't feel like I have the right to say I'm in pain. I don't feel like I have the right to say I'm struggling every day. I don't feel like I have the right to say my life is hell, my life is pain, my life is suffering.

I don't feel like I have the right to say those things. Yet I say them anyway. And I live this pain, every single day of my life. Because every single day, no matter how subtle, I suffer from gender dysphoria of my body not matching my mind. Every single day, no matter how little problem it presents, I struggle with my autistic idiosyncrasies clashing with society.

Every single day, I live in fear of succumbing to any number of problems originating from my bipolar disorder, and even when I don't, I am constantly bombarded by my own mind's hyperdrive. Processing a million different things and inputting them all at once, with poorly-assembled filters that could fail at any time.

Hells made worse by living them every day.
So isolation cures most of them, except the explosion of bipolar's mania, which is made oh so very much worse. 

Of course, all things considered. Miraculous as it may be, I am reasonably speaking well-adjusted. People who interact with me might just think I'm quiet, or a bit odd; they wouldn't really think of autism. (The last time I was asked, it was by a police officer, who wanted to make sure my stuttering wasn't because of either brain damage ensued from my car crash or from consuming alcohol, both things he would have obvious reason to take action on.)

That's because I have coping mechanisms in place.

I genuinely am able to live a happy, peaceful life. (Especially considering, and I can't emphasize this enough, I have a girlfriend that I love, who loves me, and that by being with I feel alive; they really are a motivator for me and an anchor point, as it were, a "rock" to rest upon.)

But said happy life is largely the result of wastefully squandering what I have, akin to a drug addict. An easy example to utilize here is the game of mafia, which I have so heavily integrated into the core of my life. A running joke is that mafia is the ultimate drug addiction.

The real piece of wisdom comes in when you realize it's not actually a joke. Mafia serves as an escape from the world. My problems still exist outside of it, and manifest even within it, but while I am playing it I don't have to consciously think about those problems. They don't go away. In fact, they only get larger. But while there, I can bury myself away, happily doing nothing.

I derive a sense of self-worth from it. It is self-destructive, it is incredibly harmful, but it makes me feel happy. It is a way to deal with the torture, but it does not cure the torture. It is a way of temporarily forgetting about my problems, my suffering, but it can't cure them no matter how hard I try and by immersing myself too heavily in it as I've done on occasions my life has taken nosedives, plummeting in a downward spiral.

Sounds like a drug to me.

I do have non-mafia coping mechanisms.
Even productive ones! That being, non-gaming coping mechanisms, since I play more games than just mafia to escape the misfortunes of the world.

But while those coping mechanisms exist. They can't cure the problem. Just mitigate the damage of it. 

I am always struggling between my self, and my sense of others. The desire to do good is there, but so too is the struggle to overcome my limitations, to bypass my roadblocks, my shortcomings. And I fail, time and time again. And each failure is more painful than the last, because each time I tell myself I learned, I'll do better, and that I won't make the same mistake again...so when I make it anyway, there's a sense of dread and despair, of a broken record.

And, yes, hopelessness. Always, wasting. Never who I want to be, never doing what I want to do, and when faced with this truth, using excuse after excuse. (Heck, you can find them here in this very blog!) But never changing. Half because I don't want to change things I can, half because I can't change the things I want to. So always on repeat.

Some things I most want to can't change. Yet I have the power to change plenty. An ability I knowingly and deliberately squander. Itself a form of cruelty, self-defeating, even destructive, yet I learned to revel in this debauchery as a coping mechanism.

There are good coping mechanisms, but most of mine aren't. I can change coping mechanisms, but I struggle to do so, because what I want to do isn't to change the coping mechanism, but to change myself so that there's no need to cope in the first place.

Something which I know is impossible to obtain. And the circle continues anew. A self-feeding loop.

I do, however, have a saving grace. It's a form of acceptance. Knowing that I can't ever get what I want has allowed me to come to peace to it to some extent, and I can live my every day life at least in part due to that, and I don't think that's an inherently bad thing; it's actually a quite rare gift.

I have some level of peace about who and what I am, something most people in similar situations never obtain and their response to never obtaining it is quite often disproportionately suicide; my risk of that is quite low because I know I can live this way even if I hate it.

It is also a curse though because that same tendency has a downside of feeding the negativity. It can help me, in the sense that it prevents the negativity from taking control altogether. But it can also hurt me further, because it allows the negativity to foster, to thrive.

It's actually quite possible, in fact, that this sense of acceptance is in some ways...my numbness from succumbing to the torture. It does fit a number of the symptoms; I am continuously in pain, and certainly have been pushed to breaking before. It'd make sense that if I did in fact develop acceptance as an adjustment to the pain, it'd make me more numb to it.

Granted, this being psychological pain. This being psychological torture. Acceptance as a numbing agent to the pain doesn't stop it altogether. The pain still destroys my life. It just doesn't do as much damage as it would without the acceptance.

​I don't really have a direction to take this morbid blog after this. I certainly don't have a positive spin to put on it; with more clever writing I may have managed one, but honestly I'm not sure this is a subject which would deserve a positive spin. This is a debilitating thing.

Every day, I have that torture, and every day, I know it could be oh so much worse.

I'm not even scratching the surface of my mind here.

​But I thought I'd at least give you a piece of it.

By which, I mean, it loves to invent new anime. Phyrra and Cyrus, as you may recall, was birthed by this method. I had a story I meant to blog about but didn't get around to which was another one, and today I had yet another one, albeit this one kinda self-plagiarizing from the previous one.

I don't have the time to explain it today, but it was a really interesting one, to say the least.

Speaking of Phyrra and Cyrus. I didn't do anything productive aside from making content which may actually appear as like five minutes of filler in an episode. Basically, you'd know this if I uploaded my ramble on metals, but adamantium is a metal in the colliniverse. (Specifically, it is akin to steel, in that it is not in of itself, per se, so much a single metal, as much as it is a refined version of a different metal, of which there are dozens. As steel is refined iron into dozens of different alloys, so too is adamantium a refined version of a different mythic metal with dozens of different alloys.)

So today I was wondering if it was in fact possible to have Wolverine expies, that have adamantium melded to their bones--the answer is yes...but that it is not only incredibly expensive, but also incredibly stupid. It can be directly compared to, beit our world or Phyrra and Cyrus's, making a full-body plate male armor...out of gold. Yeah, it's something you could do. It's not going to kill you to do it, either.

It's just a waste of money because in real life it is utterly worthless. The properties of the metal mean that whatever benefit it could offer in theory, when molded into that form, don't work in reality. Still, some people do it anyway. It does offer more mass behind, say, a punch; it does make bones unbreakable, which can be convenient for someone who would break bones a lot.

But the tradeoff is that even the most dense of bones is lighter than the lightest of metals to plate the bones in, so you'd become much, much heavier, not to mention, less flexible. Bones are designed to be a bit flexible; adamantium...isn't. So you become stiff, almost robotic, and need to be much stronger, and are still weighed down.

But seeing as this is a setting which has plenty of golorgs (I need to do the ramble on them as well; short version, that's short for golem organism which is the magical-based equivalent of a cybernetic organism, aka, a cyborg), and there are some situations where it could come in handy (say someone was born with the condition of brittle bones, which is a thing in our world so why not in Phyrra and Cyrus), plus, there's no rule which says that you need to have every bone be adamantium.

It's still incredibly expensive to do, but on a small scale for those who have an actual use for it, it can be done. Not something you'd want to do if you can go without, though, thus, why it'd be stupid for people to just randomly do it. This would come into canon as maybe being a five minute segment if that of a throwaway quick fight for fun, where a contestant would have it and Phyrra would topple them.

​Something I could easily do away with, or expand further, as the need arose, basically.

Just not what I need to be doing!
At work, I sketched out in some quick doodles a few traditional Paladin weaponry.
Now, mind you, what I mean by traditional, is exactly that; they are things which are common due to tradition, but are not in any way shape or form mandatory in that Paladins use the weaponry they forge, and the weaponry they forge is weaponry suited to their style of combat/lifestyle choices.

I didn't get all of it done, but I still knocked a few basic doodles out for a few of them. Felt good to ~art~, even if only briefly so.

What I more came to talk about is a personal blog from my childhood, to tell a completely true story of one of my earliest memories, because it's an entertaining (if a bit mortifying) story. I had to have been either three or four years old for this incident, early. (So in the 1996-1997 range.)

Basically, the short version of it is...I was a genius child. Absolutely smart as could be, in many aspects; incredibly sharp. Fairly common descriptor of autistic children in fact; we pick up on things which most people don't, but we just have an incredibly poor understanding of other things as a tradeoff, more or less.

This is not always a good thing.

When my family was out car shopping, it happened that I was left alone in a dealership car. I don't know why I was left alone, but I was left alone in the back seat of the car. Presumably, my parents were testing the car out, and got out to talk to the dealer about details of the car, inspecting it from the front, or something like that. (They may have had the hood up, even; that'd certainly explain how they didn't notice this!)

If I was in any way restrained by a buckle (I'm presuming I was, but I have no memory of it, so if so it presented me with no challenge to my goal), I managed to undo it; I know this, because I remember crawling from the back seat...into the driver's seat.

(This is a story that, for full effect, you'd need to listen to multiple family members' perspectives.)

What I remember of this is I had a single thought:
"I wanna drive like mommy and daddy do!"
I knew the steering wheel made you go left or right; I knew the brake pedal slowed you down; I knew the acceleration pedal sped you up; I also knew that in order to start the car...mommy and daddy always pushed the brake pedal down, and ended up pulling that lever on their right sides back in order to make the car go forward.

So in the driver seat.

I did exactly that.
I think I was completely down in the pedal area where the feet were, pressing down on the brake pedal...and shifting the car into gear. (Or at the very least, neutral.)

My parents were, prior to this, completely unaware anything was happening...but started panicking when the car I was in started moving forward. (Thank heavens there was no key in the car because even at that age I coulda turned the car on. Though, granted, had I managed it, I probably woulda been stopped before shifting the gears, butstill.)

The main reason for the panic, however, was not because of the implication...

...But because my brother was right in front of the car as I pulled this stunt.

So they made a mad dash to the driver side door, figuring out what had happened, in order to stop me.

In other words.
As a child.
I almost ran over my brother, by "driving" a car.

To this day, how I pulled off what I did baffles my parents, and even I'm not really sure what happened. All I remember from the incident, really, IS that thought of "I wanna drive like my mommy and daddy do!" and the car lurching forward after I fiddled around.

​Makes a good story to tell at the least.

So I still need to find a spot to unload all the stuff in my notepad file as to not risk having that info lost forever; I need to share a fair amount on blogs, too. I have my blogs loosely ordered such that they are grouped by subject, making it easier for me to ramble, too. All the big ones are organized so that I can unleash them all at once and all the small ones are in the notepad, waiting to be launched.

​Progress!

You may remember that my working title for Phyrra and Cyrus was INFIverse. (Or INFINIverse, I forget which.)
You may also remember that is an existing name of a 'verse. I didn't bother to do research on it, just enough to know both names were taken so couldn't be used as an original name.

Today I came up with that.

It kinda sucks. So if I can find a better original name, you bet I'm gonna use it.

But it returned an absolute zero on google results, which means it's unique to me: the colliniverse.

The meaning is not nearly as special or accurate.
The INFINIverse is accurate because of the concept of INFINITY. (I still need to give you that creation myth.)
The colliniverse takes a concept from there, the collision of INFINITY and Nothingness, but it's not quite the same especially since technically speaking it wasn't quite what you'd call a collision. (Again I'd need to give you that creation myth for you to understand.)

So for me I still consider this a working title. A NEW working title. A working title UNIQUE TO ME. But still, something which with luck I can think of something better down the road.

OH WELL.

For now, it'll do.

I am also beginning to lay the groundwork for further Phyrra and Cyrus work.

This will take me quite a while to finish, but I got about a third of what I wanted to do today, done. And that's progress!

Soyeah.

We're getting there.

​Slowly but surely.

More specifically, what I mean by that is...I feel like I can actually do the things that I want to do.
I have the sense, not immediately.
I have the sense, I'll have to fight for them.
I have the sense, that I'll need to make sacrifices for them.
I have the sense, that my motivation will come and go and that they'll never come to be unless I have the drive to keep going even when motivation wanes.

But I have the sense.
I can do it.

Right now, basically.

I just...believe in myself.
I don't often give myself that luxury, especially as time has shown I often can't.
But.

I feel like I can actually do it.

I can make something of my life.

I feel it.
I know it.
It is a strange sensation to have.
That feeling, which I know is nearly impossible.
Yet to know that somehow I can do it.

It defies words, but I have it now.
And due to how rare it is.
Due to how much of a commodity it is.
I felt the need to blog about it.

I am going to do this.
It will take a hell of a long time to get right, get good.
​But I can do this and I will do this.

Sure enough, not enough time for me to do what I want to do!
I had a double ramble planned with two topics, one revolving around Bard in Phyrra and Cyrus and the other covering a dream I had last night which I extrapolated into a fairly interesting anime story idea. (The dream was that I was watching said anime show with my siblings, and then later watching it by myself on my TV...in spite of not having had cable TV for at least a year or two if not more.)

Alas.

I need to go to bed, because I've got work tomorrow.

​Tomorrow will also be a "so many things, so little time" day for the record. I'm anticipating about half a dozen obligations by my estimate. I'll count it as a win if I get half of those done; I'll double my win points if one of said things is girlfriend time. <3

A huge, huge, HUGE breakthrough on Phyrra and Cyrus.
I wanted to give the full blog today, but I was too busy today dealing with stuff to do that, so all I can really give you is that I'm on the verge of naming their world...and have successfully given their 'Verse a name: I gave it a working title of The INFIverse.

Now.

That might sound like a lame name.

But it's anything but.

That name has regards to do with the coolest creation myth I've ever made, and it took me HOURS of brainstorming to hash it out.

A quick google search indicates that I'll need to come up with something else as Infiverse seems to be taken even though I am quite specific about it being INFIverse (the extra letter capitalization holds meaning), but a working title which needs to be changed because it's taken is better than no title for the verse at all!

Still, since the name's apparently taken I'll need to work a little bit harder, but I'm oh so very close.

I also--and this is directly correlated to the creation myth--worked out what the most popular religion in Phyrra and Cyrus is. Quick note, there's no confirmed deities in existence, be it lowercase god or uppercase God, and yet there's numerous religions in existence revolving around the few aspects of the creation of their world that they don't have explained away with science.

Basically there's a very small gap in their knowledge, and that gap is where religion enters the picture; monotheism is more common than pantheism, and I developed the name of the most popular religion. It's probably the name of an existing religion but then again what isn't: Voidism. Again this'll make sense when I explain the way their world was created, which I can't wait to do, but unfortunately need to wait until tomorrow to do.

​I'm just so excited!

Am I back to blogging content?

...Ehhh, debatable.

But with luck, I'm on my way there!

The real breakthrough there is...well. I'm back! In a way that I have been longing for.

My desire to make art has been slowly rising. And while the creator within me has been alive and well for a while, the actual writer within me has been fairly dormant.

But today...both explosively grew out until they were bursting out the seams.

I want to make art.
I want to make it badly.
I want to make things.

And more than that.

Something finally happened.

For the first time.

I actually began writing the script for an episode of Phyrra and Cyrus.

Now granted.

I took some shortcuts with descriptions; there are plenty of details which should be there that are absent.
And I only got what I estimate is around 7.5 minutes (with another 30 seconds or so that I didn't have time to write but got worked out) of somewhere around 22 or so minutes. (Every episode, I estimate, will have around 20 minutes of content, with an opener that's around 2 minutes give or take 30 seconds, and a closer that is also 2 minutes give or take 30 seconds placing total episode time at 23-25 minutes; the first episode of the series, however, will have no opener at the beginning, and its closer will be the opener for the first season, as is a sort of tradition for anime.)

So it's not like I suddenly have everything.

But the point is.

I DID IT!

Only part of it, but I did it.

I am taking the first step towards committing to making Phyrra and Cyrus a thing, a thing not living just in my head.

Now granted.
There's still miles to go in conceptual art.

Something I'm considering also doing is storyboarding of sorts, where I'll use pieces of paper to demonstrate thumbnail-style (that being, stick figures if that, making heavy use of text and generally just giving a rough idea) "frames", demonstrating key areas of the episodes.

...I'm probably making trained animators cry with my (absolute lack of) terminology, buthey. I am not a trained animator; I'm not even a trained artist.

I know there's a lot of work to be done.
Concept art.
Storyboarding.
Scriptwriting.

All of these aren't done, and need to be done.
Worldbuilding is mostly done, but I still need to fill in some details like the name of the world, the names of the continents, oceans, countries, and cities visited.

I need to come up with names for background characters, and design them.
I need to finish designing the 13 main characters, 4 main villains, and the 10 underling-villains (1's more solo, 1's a direct underling of the first, 2 are direct underlings of Gunther, and the remaining six are the sins under the final).

For that matter, even the designs for Phyrra and Cyrus could use touching up.

Still.
I have a good idea of what I can, realistically, do, and not do.
I can probably get concept art in tandem with the script and storyboarding good enough where an animator can animate something to match my vision.
I can write a script good enough where a voice actor can speak the lines necessary.

I can probably teach myself how to be an editor. I have absolutely zero skills in this area, and I know it's a skill difficult to master, and will be immensely time-consuming to do, and once I am at the editing stage I'll also be running into "okay, I have everything individually I need to make it reality...now how DO I make it reality with the pieces put together", if that makes sense.

But this is okay, because that's so far in the future that by the time I am anywhere even remotely close to prepared, I'll have the time/effort necessary where I'll be able to put the needed work in and find out exactly what I need, and what I need to do, and so on and so forth. (And if we get to the editing stage, I'll presumably have plenty of people I can call upon for advice, because editing is like...one of the very last steps; if I get to the point where I'll need editing, everything else will be in place which means lots of help having gotten there already. See also, what I can't do.)

I can probably teach myself how to code if I get a site of my own. Multiple people are willing to teach me, too. (Plus, if I have leftover funds from whatever money I'd use to MAKE Phyrra and Cyrus, I can always just pay someone for this.)

There are, however, limits to what I can do.

Realistically speaking, I'm not going to be able to animate Phyrra and Cyrus. I may be able to teach myself how to make animations, but to match my vision requires a level of skill that I simply don't have nor ever will. No school can teach me what I'd need to know. I just know it. This is something you may wonder, but I just have a head for it, in knowing that I won't be able to make Phyrra and Cyrus in a way I am satisfied with if I were to attempt to animate it.

So I need to have an animator. Animators won't work for free, so I need to pay them.

I can finish writing the eight songs that I'll need (four openers, and four closers), but I'll need someone to actually sing them. Some of these I can probably go cheap. Heck, my sisters may be able to sing one or two of them and if I become an editor then I'd be able to edit it into something amazing. But not all of them will be; I will need to hire some people to actually sing.

I probably cannot compose the songs to an extent where I am happy with them. I can do what amounts to a storyboard of a song: give the lyrics, give my horrible singing of the lyrics, give some loose idea in the form of descriptors and maybe some sound for what I'm going for, but that's about all I can do. To get openers and closers to the level I would be satisfied with them, I would need to hire a composer.

Granted, that's actually not too terribly expensive from my understanding, but it IS money I have to have and invest.

And most of all.
I have 13 main characters.
Let's say your average episode needs 5 extra voices.
That's not a perfect estimate, obviously. Some episodes won't need any extra voices. Others may need more than 5. Many will need less than 5. Heck, the main characters aren't all appearing from the first episode (as they're introduced along the way), so it's not like it's 13 voice actors from the onset plus the extras.

But for the sake of a high estimate. Let's say I need 18 characters, every episode.

For a fact, I know that any voice actor that can offer the level of professional voice acting I'm after, needs to be paid. And this, I believe. Isn't that cheap.

​Let's see if I can pull some quick estimates.

​For composers, according to this old article, the two ways I'm most likely to get are % of budget (depends on how much money I raise, then), or a rate per minute. Off of 2011 values, $~425/minute (since I don't know if it'd be 1-5 instruments or 6-11) * 2.5 minutes * 8 = $8,500. And that's from 2011. According to this site, that's ~$9,522.17 now. So a general roundabout figure is probably $10,000.

For just the composer. If I am lucky.

Due to google misinterpreting my search to be for hiring a singer to perform (rather than to compose for you), it's a little difficult to find what the cost of singing is. Presumably, quite high.

For voice actors, I've found a site which I'm presuming is up to date, the question being how relevant it is. I believe it's pertinent though, so according to these numbers, if we assume a worst-case scenario of it being considered a Large Market (when it comes to money I have to spend on Phyrra and Cyrus being a reality...well obviously I want to show it off to as many people as I can, but the more I show it off to, the more it costs to make in the first place, so more people = worse, from a budgeting perspective)...
...Well, that's $118 * 18 * 48 = $101,952 to make.

That's not impossible for me to get. I mean, with an actual job proper rather than minimum-wage lifeguard, I could probably save that amount within 1-3 years. (Of course, if I had 100,000 to spare, my first desire would be to spend it on transitioning because if memory from when I looked at it serves me, $100,000 is just about the cost to fully cover a complete transition start to finish when you add the bills up between psychiatry, pills, doctor appointments, hair removal, and surgery. Those are the bare minimum, but they alone are expensive.)

However, costs for an animator...*shudder*
Hoh boy, if this is to go by, that's gonna suck. I'm presuming it'd be flash animation, butstill. $15 * 60 * 5 * 8 (for the openers), then
$15 * 60 * 20 * 48
= $36,000 + $864,000.

...And that's 2011. Rough estimate of current cost, $967,900.17 + $40,329.17 = $1,008,229.34. Would be over a million dollars to animate.

I can't earn that much.

I'm not sure I can even raise that much.
But that rate was by my understanding an incredibly cheap rate. A cheap rate, in 2011. And I'd need basically a million dollars to pull off 48 episodes.

Frick I'm a whole lot less certain about being able to pull that off.

Animation, up there with voice acting, is the skill I most cannot make Phyrra and Cyrus without outside help on.
And yet, they are singlehandedly the two most expensive parts I'd have in making Phyrra and Cyrus.

But dammit.

I want to make Phyrra and Cyrus real.

Somehow.

I don't know how I can make that much money.
How would I?

Maybe I could find people willing to work for below the market rate.
Maybe.

If I offer them exposure, proper credits and whatnot. Maybe figure out a way where Phyrra and Cyrus would make a profit and offer them a percentage of it. (God I don't want that because honestly I'm not looking to make money from Phyrra and Cyrus and it's quite the opposite I don't really want to make any money from it; I want it to be there for everyone, easily.)

Maybe. Maybe, I could figure out a way of somehow negotiating prices down.

But there has to be a limit to how much I could reduce the prices. I can see. If the animator(s) worked at half market value, potentially. At a stretch. I can maybe, maybe, maybe, MAYBE cover the costs of Phyrra and Cyrus with $500,000.

Which is a range that is maybe, maybe, MAYBE JUST EVER SO MAYBE. Doable with fundraising. 

I don't know how I'm going to make this a reality.
But I'm not going to let this discourage me. It's daunting. It's disheartening in a "this is gonna SUCK" kind of way. But it is not discouraging. I'm still going to make it a reality. I'm still going to figure out how to make Phyrra and Cyrus a real thing. And a real thing, available for free online, with people able to comment on episodes. (For instance, on Youtube. Not necessarily there, but that's an option.)

And yeah I know.

With inflation.

It's only going to get more expensive the longer I wait.

The longer I procrastinate on getting to the part of needing to hire these people.
The more expensive it'll get to actually hire these people.

Yeah, I know.

There's a lot of work to be done before I am anywhere even remotely close to ready.

The things I have yet to do may sound simple when I say them, but as soon as I face them, they become immensely daunting.

Designing about 30 major characters, along with designing numerous extras, plus background characters that may only appear for one split second for one scene as part of a crowd. Names, appearances, what they sound like, what they wear.

Naming every city, every region, every country, every location, visited.

Creating every monster/creature/beast/etc. fought in adventures, designing areas, landscapes, terrain.

Figuring out, second to second, every piece of dialog, every facial expression, every single tone used, to convey the meaning I am intending. Figuring out how every single bit is framed, such that I have a second-by-second playout of how every episode goes, and writing the script allowing this to be shown.

I need to do it all.

I know I can do it.

I am working towards it.

I'm not at the stage, I'd say. Where I need to start trying to get into contact with people to help me get to the places and people who can help me out. Basically. I'm not at the stage where I think I need to begin reaching out to everyone on how to make it a reality, how to get the things I need, and so on and so forth.

There is just oh so much work that I need to have FINISHED before then.

And it is all writing and art, pretty much.

It is all the two things within me that were dormant and have now exploded outward.

I can do this.

If it takes me years, so be it.

But I know I can do this.
If it takes me a ton of help, so be it.
If I have to make some personal sacrifices, so be it.

But I can do this.

I know I can do it.

I know that it may sound strange to have that confidence. I don't know where it's coming from.
I just have it.

I. can. do. this.
So somehow​, I am going to get it done!

So for Phyrra and Cyrus, from the onset, I've told you their orientations (Phyrra's bi, Cyrus is demi), but for a while I've wanted to share/reveal those of others.

Gora is straight.
Ace is bi.
Cedrick is straight.
Kaze is an asexual demiromantic, in that he doesn't much care for sex, but he's perfectly capable of having feelings for someone. This makes more sense when you know the blurb I have for him which I wanted to share as well. (Also new for today.)

Kaze
Homicidal Maniac
Kaze enjoys the carnage of a good massacre, killing dozens of people at a time just for fun. He is ruthless and relentless, striking with no mercy. The only things capable of impressing him are combat prowess and killing capability. However, in spite of being both amoral and unscrupulous, if someone holds conviction in their ideologies and is capable of backing them up, it is possible to earn his respect.

Myra is actually not someone I know the exact orientation of. I know she's not a lesbian and I get the sense she at the very least can like guys, but the specifics beyond that, I don't actually know; she hasn't told me that.
Bard is bi, but while he is bi, he does have a particular fondness for lovely ladies.
Clara is straight.
Hera is a lesbian.
Will is pan.
Lily is a lesbian.
And Alena is pan.

Now is this really that relevant to the story? Nope, not really! But these are little trivia facts that I learned just by really getting to know them.