...But in this case, boredom is a boon to productivity, as it means that I'm forced to actually do something meaningful.
Well, no. I am quite capable of wasting my time on something meaningless--it's just that I'm not in the mood to do any of those meaningless things so productivity it is.

In this case, blogging about what should have been yesterday's blog.

Yesterday, at work, I developed a story which I would call whichever is the least used of "Lord of Minions", "Minion Lord", "Master of Minions", and "Minion Master". I say 'whichever is the least used', because, let's face it. All four of those titles have been used before somewhere, it's just a question of which is the most viable to use.

In my notes, I lean towards the former two involving it being a Lord, but for a specific reason; the Lord of Minions/Minion Lord (hereafter just referred to as the Lord) may start commanding as the master of just Minions, but eventually expands such that his domain includes subjugating humans as well, and 'Lord' sounds more like a ruler of humans than 'Master' does to me.

I'm not quite sure where to begin. I guess I'll go with how the story starts. You may be able to deduce, it is in fact a Villain Protagonist. The Minions have, recently, lost their Lord--and need a new one. They see the protagonist, and basically kidnap him to their base, where they explain that congratulations! They have selected him as their new Lord.

Though initially baffled by this, the protagonist runs with it, figuring, "Sure, why not?"

Minions, for as long as there has been recorded history, have sought after a human to be their Lord, to command them. The human theory for this is that some ancient evil overlord created the minions as a servant race--the Minion theory is actually a bit of the opposite, in that Minions developed a symbiotic relationship with their human Lord. The human Lord would have the Minions lead him to prosperity, and in return, the Lord would give the Minions both a sense of purpose and direction to continue their existence.

Minions, after all, don't just randomly pick people off the street (though that's how it's portrayed, for comedic value if nothing else). Every Lord they have ever picked has the traits of extreme Ambition, incredible Intelligence, a sense of Logistics, and a degree of Pragmatism.

Over the millennia, they have found that these traits are typically suited towards an Evil Overlord, who have them in abundance. Granted, said Evil Overlords tend to be a little bit weak on Pragmatism at times and some (particularly those heavily utilizing "We Have Reserves") are a bit low on Logistics, but said Lords tend to be the shortest-lived ones and don't cause long-term damage to the Minions' existence.

Still, since the traits are associated with Evil people to the point where it's basically synonymous, this gives them a bad reputation. The protagonist, for what it's worth, is no different than prior Lords in this regard--he is an Evil Bastard, a visionary dreaming of world conquest, incredibly cruel and sadistic to his enemies...but who is also incredibly benign to those who serve him.

Think how the Evil Overlord List, if followed precisely, is pretty much making a benevolent dictator: still an evil person who controls their country strictly, but who is fair about it and highly pragmatic. A "benign god", even. In the case of the protagonist Lord, this manifests first in his actual investment in his Minions.

Some Lords bother to have a few favorite Minions, even giving them English names. But our protagonist Lord takes that to the next level; he treats every Minion as an asset, doesn't see them as disposable at all, takes the time to learn the Minion's language both written and spoken, learns about Minion culture, calls Minions by their names in the Minion language (unless pressed for time; Minion names tend to be multiple syllables in their native tongue so he has nicknames for them that are one or two syllables to say in case of emergency), and basically treats them almost as if they were his equals.

This is how details of Minion society and biology are slowly revealed.

For instance--the Lord is always, functionally, Immortal...in the "does not age", sense at least. In spite of being human, the Lord will not age for as long as they are Lord of the Minions. The Minions have a theory that their mind link to the Lord allows them to collectively channel the smallest portion of their lifespan into the Lord. Since there are so many Minions at any given time, it doesn't shorten the Minions lifespan at all (they still live for about the same length as a human), but it does keep their Lord alive.

Of course. As is obvious. Most Lords never live long enough for that to be tested, and most Minions don't die of old age because they die long before that following the orders of their Lord. Still, over their recorded history, they've had some Lords and Minions live long enough that they know of the effect.

Minions are biologically programmed to need a leader. It is hard-coded into their genes on the fundamental level--they need someone to which they can then follow the orders of, and they have virtually no free will. Minions, mind you, are varied enough in personality to each be as quirky as any given human, but they will mostly remain on what's essentially an autopilot unless given directions by their Lord.

They can, of course, be given passive commands by their Lord, to follow a process different than their default autopilot while waiting for instructions. And Minions are not literal-minded; they can think about what a Lord's intention behind a command are and will, to the best of their ability, fulfill their Lord's desire, even if this deviates from what orders they had been given.

But at their base nature, they can't disobey nor would they want to; they live to serve their Lord and find happiness in serving their community however their Lord deems fit. (They consider their Lord to basically be the leader of their community, even knowing that most Lords--our protagonist being the exception--don't consider themselves to be a part of said community. They're quite aware most Lords just exploit them, but the Lords still give the Minions what they are wanting, so they don't complain. Well, most of the times; as previously mentioned, Minions are as quirky as humans, so some have snark to them and are quite willing to make barbs about their Lord if they think they can get away with it.)

​Minions have similar biology to humans, albeit with some notable difference.
The average Minion is about the height of a slightly-short human; they usually have yellow skin. (Both of these attributes are possible to modify; see below.) Minions are capable of eating literally anything--and their preferred meals are rocks, soil, dirt, minerals, crystals, and the like.

Minions are all hermaphrodites, and can give birth in one of two ways. They can give birth by "carrier"--basically, identical to human pregnancy albeit taking shorter (six months). One fertilizes the egg of the other, who bears it until a live birth. The egg contains 2 children always by this method. The egg saps nutrients from the parent, and the parent develops breasts (Minions do not have breasts by default), who feeds the baby Minions for a month after birth, when they switch to eating whatever.

Minions born by carrier method have a mixture of the genes of both parents.

They can also give birth by "spawn"--think somewhere between how Uruk'hai are shown being birthed in the Lord of the Rings films, and egg-laying animals like birds. One still fertilizes the egg of the other, but instead of bearing it until a live birth, the egg is extracted, and fused to a wall of rock. The egg saps nutrients from the rock, and after extraction, the baby Minions eat their egg and then continue consuming rock thereafter.

This is, by far, the more common method, for a number of reasons. One, it can bear 1-3 children rather than being set at specifically two. Two, it allows both parents to remain workers. Pregnancy means the carrier can't continue to perform all the tasks that a Minion normally would, or at least not as easily. (Keep in mind that Minions tend to be used for fairly hard labor, including being sent en masse to their deaths in combat.)

Three, it takes half the time, at only three months, for the Minions to be born. And four, most importantly of all?
It allows for the manipulation of the genes of Minions. Minions have mastered the art of biological manipulation of their genetics. Some things never change; a Minion will always have some traits of both parents, and the subservience to their commander is something so hard-coded into their genetics it literally can't be removed.

However, many things can change. The size of the minion, the basic biology of the minion, color of the minion's skin, biological adaptions like poisonous claws, webbed hands/feet, digging claws, different teeth/fangs, you name it. Our protagonist Lord makes a universal modification to the Minions such that all born after are given free will, or as close to it as is possible for Minions, and the ability to take command and the ability to not require a commander.

While the subservience to a commander trait still exists, what this means is that if a Minion born after our protagonist Lord made this change decides that they don't have any commander, they are not obliged to follow an order. Of course. By their culture, even with this freedom, Minions still voluntarily subjugate themselves, because they want a commander--he just made it so they didn't need one.

Minions reach adulthood within 3 years, and in as little as one year, can be old enough to work (think teenager), which when you combine it with the above traits, makes them rather numerous. (Can be born in as little as 3 months with triplets, have a human lifespan, and yet are an adult in a fraction of the time it takes for a human to reach adulthood.)

Minions are both coldblooded and warmblooded, in that they absorb the heat from their environment by default. This means that they aren't bothered by the heat (which makes sense, since many of them live in environments which radiate a lot of heat). However, when the heat alone of the environment is not enough to sustain them, then can burn energy to generate heat of their own.

Minions' skin is scaled, and unless they have been specifically modified otherwise, this scaled skin is basically as tough as armor. (Not that that stops them from wearing armor anyway, since sometimes they need the extra layer of protection.) This armored scaly skin can also be made even harder, obviously, albeit suffering some penalty to flexibility. (There's a tradeoff involved with all genetic modifications. If there were one perfect combo, it'd be universally used, but since no perfect biological combo exists, you have to sacrifice some traits in order to promote others.)

The average Minion's strength is about the level of a high human in strength--so a high-strength human against an average Minion is an even match; a normal human against a Minion or a high strength human against a high strength Minion places the human at a disadvantage. Minions can be weaker, of course, usually when they have traded muscles for some other purpose, and Minions can be stronger to superhuman levels, though again, I reiterate that no perfect combo exists.

As I previously mentioned, Minions are on average a little bit shorter than humans, but specialized Minions can be as tall as humans or even taller--notably, the elite combat forces of Minions are usually of the taller variety, since the increased size often offers an increased advantage in power.

There is a major difference in Minions from humans, however--they never sweat, they never urinate (their parts down there are strictly for procreation), never defecate, or any other similar body reactions. If they ever have a need to get something out of their body, it's via vomiting, but since Minions can eat anything, this is an incredible rarity.

This does have a bit of a nasty side-effect, often weaponized: toxins in Minions are not excreted by any of the mentioned methods, and thus, build up inside of the Minion. Their blood thus becomes poisonous over the course of their lives, and slightly corrosive since acids also build up. The older the Minion, the worse this effect is.

An interested fact about Minion culture is that they have five words for gender. Their default gender in English is typically assigned as Male, because they are all incredibly muscular, lack breasts, and their 'male' anatomy is more visible than their 'female' anatomy.

However, in their own language, Minions have five genders: "Fertilizes only" (male), "Only is fertilized" (female), "Both fertilizes and can be fertilized" (hermaphrodite, though they also use this for intersex individuals), "neither fertilizes or can be fertilized" (agendered), and "self-fertilizes" (reproduces without the need of a partner).

Most Minions default to the hermaphrodic pronoun, but Minions do have concepts of gender separate from concepts of biological sex. While Minions' genders match biological sex disproportionately often (that owes to some extent to their biological ability to modify genes), they can on occasion identify as a gender not matching their biological sex.

There is one final fact about Minions, too--technically speaking, they're biologically compatible with humans. They can impregnate humans, and they can be impregnated by humans. (The only difference is that the length of the pregnancy depends on the species of the parent.)

They can only use the "carrier" method of birth regardless of which parent is which race, but it's still fully possible.

Mind you--the resulting offspring is born 100% Minion regardless of who which parent is. It's just that they have human genes mixed in with their Minion genes, akin to having been modified via "spawn" method--for instance, a common trait is to have free will. They may also have their scales/skin be a more human color. Hair is more common as well. (Minions can be born with hair, but it's about 40/60 between hair/bald.)

They are still born hermaphrodites in most cases, however, they may inherit "female" traits such as breasts and a shrunken penis, or "male" traits of the opposite. (Of course, both at once is not impossible, but it's not common, either.)

Naturally, this isn't something that's known at the start of the story--Minions have heavy prejudice against them from humans, and understandably so since they're seen not unjustifiably as "servants of Evil". Our current protagonist Lord, in addition to world conquest, is mostly planning ways to leave lasting peace and prosperity, including equality between the two races.

He is evil, but he still dreams of a utopia. One still ruled by him, mind you, but a place lacking discrimination. When he starts conquering human lands, he outright orders his Minions to not discriminate against humans, in spite of how humans don't reciprocate. He welcomes humans into the fold of his growing empire by integrating them in with a policy of, more or less:
"As long as you don't defy me, you're free to do as you wish. If you actively decide to obey me, then you will be rewarded proportional to your contribution."

He accepts humans into anywhere in his chain of command, provided they treat Minions the same way he does: with respect and equality, not looking down on them, not devaluing them, not discriminating against them. And eventually when facing some evil empires (after all, the Lord is not the only one to be an Evil conqueror in the setting; it's a fairly common thing), they can even bond (albeit with much...encouragement...from our protagonist).

And you know how long it took me to cook all that up?

...Less than ten minutes.

It's such a rich idea. I did so much worldbuilding for it, and I think it's a really neat story idea!

Alas.

I, being me, will likely never make it reality.

So a prior obstacle I was facing was coming up for a name of the planet Phyrra and Cyrus is set on. Today, I did that.

It has more to it than that of course.
To understand this ALL, you'd need me to give you a ramble on the birth of the colliniverse, but I don't feel like doing all of that (it was intended to be a full ramble on its own) just as a prelude for my real ramble.

The cliffnotes that are pertinent are, the colliniverse (the name of the setting for Phyrra and Cyrus) is thusly named because of the collision (thus, colliniverse) between INFINITY and Nothingness (thus, why INFINIverse/INFIverse were working titles and preferred titles for the setting until unfortunately I learned they were taken, alas).

There are four realms making up the colliniverse: the spirit realm, demon realm, mortal realm, and afterlife.

The first entities began to form simultaneously in two of these realms: the demon realm and spirit realm. These proto-demons and proto-spirits began to take on some properties of their realm (demons got the short end of the stick, but due to this fact, were the innovators of several breakthroughs).

While it took a long time for them to gain both shape and form, once they had begun to do so, they began to interact with their environment. Spirits learned that unless suffering cessation of existence, they could never truly perish. This meant that while they could visit the afterlife, they could never permanently reside within.

Demons meanwhile learned that to go to the afterlife, they had to suffer irreparable damage to their form, usually the utter destruction of said form altogether--a one way trip. They could of course suffer cessation of existence like a spirit, but they also had a permanent destruction. Thus, demons basically invented the concept of death.

Spirits and demons alike found that they could procreate, creating more spirits and demons; spirits and demons found that on some occasions, new spirits/demons could form without procreation (more common for spirits than demons tho).

Later on, some demons found out that in spite of reaching adulthood and maturing, they would continue to go through the process of time development--and since at adulthood they were at a prime, they would go past their prime and wither, even die. Thus, demons invented the concept of aging as well, something foreign to spirits aside from in the context of birth-to-maturity (which spirits understood).

Spirits also found they could do something demons couldn't. In ONE specific area of the mortal realm, they found that they were able to influence it. They were vaguely aware of the vast expanse of the mortal realm beyond said area, but slowly shaped this world's properties, within the confines of what they were able to manipulate with their limited influence.

This world is the world on which Phyrra and Cyrus takes place. Spirits were struggling with creating anything with a soul in the mortal realm, in spite of now being able to (briefly) visit said realm. (Demons, too, learned that they could visit this realm.)

They had the right building blocks, but something was missing. The spark of life just wasn't there...
...Until a demon named Lilith deliberately, willingly, underwent cessation of existence to impart pieces of her soul to all of the potential proto-life.

This process was what the planet needed to jumpstart evolution. (Mind you, evolution of life was possible without her--it's just that she made it advance leaps and bounds. She also did this at least partially out of spite, to leave her mark on the world as a "screw you" to spirits.)

And thus, the world would forever bear her name: Lilim.

Incidentally, two more demons also contributed.

Once Lilith provided her mark, demons soon learned it was possible to imbue life with their soul, albeit suffering cessation of existence when doing so. Life, mind you. Didn't require demon souls in order to thrive. There's not a finite, limited, supply of souls. New souls for life are born all the time. It's just that it's possible for a demon to make one particular lifeform have their soul.

Incarnos figured out how to import himself to the mortal realm, permanently, WITHOUT suffering the cessation of existence demons previously had suffered. He even kept his identity and personality, albeit losing his original shape and all his prior experience. The trick was that it needed to be done from the afterlife, and to imbue the new life with its soul at the exact moment the life would gain a soul.

So Incarnos invented the process of...reincarnating.

And finally, perfecting both the work of Incarnos and Lilith, we have Huuma, who reincarnated himself into a proto-human, yet also managed to pass on a small piece of his soul (not enough to destroy him, but enough where all of his progeny would bear at least some of his gifts) to all of his offspring. The whole was retained, but still passed on.

And it was from him that humans eventually formed. (It was not instantaneous, mind you.)

Eventually, spirits and demons alike perfected their forms, their lives, their abilities, their aspects, and so on and so forth and how to enter into the mortal realm. But this is some of the backstory for the process, which I could elaborate on further if I gave you the original ramble on how this state came to be in the first place.

Butyeah. The world has a name now: Lilim.

Now I just need to unbury my drawing of a rough map of Lilim, and figure out how to create more precise geography and from that geography map out intuitive kingdoms from which I can then create the nations that will be named and visited.

And from there, it's naming cities. If I can name all major cities, then I'll have basically done the last bit of worldbuilding I need, since I already did worldbuilding on things like magical leylines, miasmic veins, and the like, with the distinction between beasts, demons, monsters, and whatnot. (Just because I neglected to share them doesn't mean I didn't do them!)

​I'm getting to where scriptwriting will be ridiculously easy.
So.

​Progress!

In my defense, I was under the impression I had, so I thought I was good. OH WELL THIS WILL BE A LONG ENOUGH BLOG THAT IT'LL MORE THAN MAKE UP FOR IT.

Basically, today I did a lot of work.
Now, mind you.
Not work on a current thing.
The thing about me is, I continue to revisit past projects of mine even when I am working on a future project. I try to prevent myself from too heavily revising--rewriting, redoing--it, but when I am doing these exercises, I try to extrapolate in areas where I hadn't visited before.

Of course, sometimes I end up rewriting anyway, but mostly through the virtue of having forgotten the original material meant to be canonical and thus replacing it, mostly accidentally. OH WELL CONSEQUENCE OF MOSTLY KEEPING THINGS IN MY HEAD.

But I know for a fact that what I did this time does cover new ground.
It's not for Phyrra and Cyrus.
It's not even for Red Hood Rider.
It's for the webcomic obsession prior to that which I still intend to make at some stage, The Descended.
I actually made two breakthroughs there.

The first is in character ages.
Before, I had kept it generic. "Somewhere in their 30s" for most, and even of those that aren't, "appears to be in their 30s" for at least one or two.

But today I made a ridiculously simple breakthrough.
While the fourth group of four adventurers introduced later into the story largely remain intentionally ambiguous on their age, I realized that I could calculate nine of 12 main characters' ages by relating them to a tenth. And the two standouts, both had ways for me to calculate their ages.

It works like this.
Argus has an older brother, who a couple years before the story begins, died of old age/natural causes. Said brother had a son, who appears to be around the same age of Argus. That gives a very specific age range, since Argus appears to be in his 28-34 age range (technically, I believe the official way I handled it is that he appeared 34 pre-ascension, and was de-aged to 28 post-descent).

If you account for the human lifespan in the setting to be ~80 years, and that the son is ~the same age appearance as Argus, and that the son was probably born when Argus's brother was in his 40s, that gives you a good estimate.

I settled on Argus's nephew being born when his father was 46, and that his father lived to the age of 80, placing the nephew at the target age range of ~34. (36, since this was a couple years ago.) I generally assumed that Argus was around the same age as his older brother, so if he's a year younger, that would make him ~81-82 at the start of the story.

Aria I knew died in her 20s, but at what spot I wasn't sure until I settled on 24 today. That left the question of how long she's been a ghost for; since her younger brother is alive and an old man, and the village she died in has only the elders of it be old enough to remember her when she was alive, that gave me a fairly good estimate. I knew she was younger than Argus, but not by too terribly much.

Her parents died before she hit puberty, so that means her younger brother wouldn't be much younger than her. If you keep the human lifespan estimate at ~80 as per the above, that gives a general range for how old she is. The village elders would have to be less than 80 currently, but more than 10 when the incident happened. So say if they were 15 when it happened and 75 now, that'd be 60 years--a little bit of an overshoot, since it'd also place her younger brother who isn't that much younger than her (I estimated him to be ~15-16 when she died) to be ~76, when I wanted him to be more in the 60s range.

So, adjust slightly, make it be ~52 years having passed with the elders a bit older when it happened and a bit younger at the time of the story, and you get her age as being ~76, younger than Argus, but not by much. It also would place her brother as in his 60s, albeit only just, so that felt about right.

And then there is the key figure for calculating everyone else's ages.
Davos is, explicitly, one of the youngest in the cast, younger even than Nathan Betrax. His age range is in the 18-26 area, though I wanted him to be at least 20 for some reason so more on the higher end of 21+ but sub-26.
Sasha is the same age as Davos--not to the same day, mind you, but within a couple of months and such, the same year. She is ever so slightly older, but not by any significant amount, and it's easier to just say she's his age, whatever his age may be.

Davos was born at a time where the remaining 8 characters (save Nathan, who is a bit younger) were all children old enough to have memories and know what their parents looked like (an event happened which orphaned them, around the time Davos was born), but still be prepubescent and not have perfect recollection of that time period. Generally, that gives the 6-12 estimate.

This fits with their age range being 30s while Davos is in his 20s, and can be further broken down.
Sarge is the oldest.
M and Enlec are about the same age, and about one year younger than Sarge.
Kinas and Sanik, being twins, are exactly the same age, and are about a year younger than M and Enlec.
Tyra is about a year younger than them, with Sinaer being six months younger than Tyra.
Nathan is at least two years younger than Sinaer, but no more than ten years younger than Sarge (which gives a bit of flexibility with his age).

So if Sarge was 12 when Davos was 0.
M/Enlec would be 11.
Kinas and Sanik would be 10.
Tyra and Sinaer (albeit barely) would be 9.
Nathan would be anywhere from 2-7 years old.

And scale that up by 20-26 years, which I believe is best at 24.
Sarge becomes 36: a bit on the older side, but he has always looked older than the rest.
M and Enlec become 35: a bit on the older side, but still looking fairly youthful.
Kinas and Sanik become 34: the exact age I pretty much envisioned them as, but didn't want to name until I figured out the chronology (which I have).
Tyra and Sinaer (albeit barely) become 33: just about the same, in their peak.
Nathan becomes anywhere from 26-31, which is about where he should be. I estimated him at 28-32, which would place his Davos birth age at 4-8, which is the right area for him.

Nathan is meant to look youthful, but still have some features highlighting later adult manhood, so I think that 29-31 is the butter zone; I'll make the snap judgement call of 31 on that basis.

Placing Davos and Sasha at the aforementioned 24.

(By the way for those who are curious as to how they look the way they do: adventurers have a limited form of age-halting, based around their level; their race's natural lifespan is extended by however many levels they have, so a normal human living 80 years that's level, say, 50, would live to be around 130, and age appropriately slowly.)

Giving the characters an exact age is something I've striven for, for ages, but never managed to figure out until today in spite of all of the pieces having been there previously.

The second breakthrough I made was actually what triggered the first.
To talk about it though, I need to go off on a tangent.
Back when I was actually trying to produce content for The Descended actively on a near-weekly basis, there was a period where I couldn't make content...but could make canonical filler content.
By that, I mean: a flashback story, giving backstory. Stuff that would eventually be featured in the story proper (and is still planned to be!), and was mostly available as bonus side-material for those devoted enough to read the right places anyway, but which was miles away from being featured.

Yet was not really spoilerific. Stuff that was planned to be integrated into the comic properly, and still is planned to be integrated into the comic properly, but which I could produce quickly and cheaply as filler, as padding, for a break allowing me to do the work I was trying to do.

​That was the Kinas Chronicle. To save you the time of looking for it (warning: insanely long, insanely badly done in most places but more on that below), here it is in full (again, not really spoilers, just backstory, but stuff that you wouldn't learn in the story proper for a long, long time):

...Incidentally, just looking at the alt-text (captions, here) makes me remember why I love Kinas as a character so much and another reason why the chronicle held power to me. He was literally telling a story mirroring my own, in a way that I couldn't possibly have known about, but which is immensely powerful to me in hindsight.

BUT I DIGRESS.

The point I was making here is.
There are self-evidently some huge flaws in the Chronicle. Aside from a little shoddy writing here and there, the narration style is too much text and not enough images. Now, I wrote this as filler, so that's okay, and in a lite novel format that's actually what you'd have, but it's still a little jarring.

Each page is absurdly long. I told the chronicle in eight images; given the length of each image, I should have cut it up to be many, many, many more than that. (Then again, once more, it was filler, designed to be done in as little time as possible, and designed to disrupt from the story as little as possible. NOT THAT THAT WORKED OUT BUT I TRIED.)

The characters, both past and present, have obvious artistic flaws, aside from Sinaer pretty much.
And the reason Sinaer doesn't share those flaws (aside from the child sprite of her) is because I used trace jobs of her for the chronicle. As in, I created a version of her using anime character maker 2, then traced that. I still drew her, technically, but it was as cheating as cheating gets and pretty much plagiarizing to do so. Obviously, that's a regret. (Done for a combination of time saving and the fact that I couldn't draw her that well at the time.)

I was utilizing the Windows 7 version of MSPaint at the time, so I made heavy usage of copy-paste.
The dialog order is incredibly hard to follow.
The images aren't done very well.
Many key characters are kept out of sight to hide my inability to draw them.
I should have done that for child-Kinas/Sinaer because their presence is the absolute low-point. (Though the way I handled Kinas's dad is not far behind.)
I covered up art with text, covered up text with text, and similar issues due to limited space per panel (in spite of the infinite canvas I was utilizing).
And so on and so forth.
It is, self-evidently, what it was.
Something shoddily thrown together that didn't have very high quality all-around.

Yet there were also some things about it that, to this day, I remain proud of.
The way the story was told and written may be flawed, but I still feel like the idea behind it holds some incredible power.
I took time to create original sprites for many of the characters' pre-"descent" appearances (since they did look different before, and after, their traumatic experience that divided the groups).
The original art I made mostly holds up to scrutiny in spite of its flaws as passable. Some of the images of David are atrocious, but I'm proud of that design.
Tyra's pre-descent appearance has some issues with proportion, such as the bow, her hands, her neck, and so on and so forth but that was all done by me and captured the essence of her.
Sanik's pre-descent appearance is almost perfect aside from the elongated neck, the arrow in relationship to his hand, and his bow in relationship to his hand (not to mention, lack of strap for the quiver).

Kinas's teenaged self is awful, but Kinas's pre-descent adult self aside from a minor perspective glitch in the chest and head, positioning of hand-to-sword, and lack of real grip on the shield (it wasn't until Red Hood Rider that I was forced to learn how to actually pull that off), is pretty much perfect.

There was something magical about the narration style, too, in the transitions held. 

All in all.
It is something that I have, in spite of its status as filler, wanted to redo for years, to keep the good and discard the bad and give it a grand do-over. But this is nothing new; I've had that feeling pretty much since a year after I made this. (Which, being in 2012 of October, was a full 5 years ago for the desire.)

Why's this relevant?

Basically, the thought occurred to me today.
There is exactly one other main character I could instead make a new Chronicle for.

In the fourth adventuring group later on, two characters have backstories directly plot relevant almost to Argus levels of importance (see below), so I can't chronicle them without massive spoilers. A third has only minimalistic backstory in general, and isn't actually that fleshed out. (Ha ha I am talking about the member that's a lich.) And the fourth has a backstory reserved for a planned sequel-series to The Descended, revolving more around him, so not something I could even remotely touch on since even in The Descended proper it's only hinted at because of the plans to reveal it later.

Kinas's chronicle pretty much tells the backstory of all eight elementals/latens, and how the groups divided into half, splitting up. So no need to cover the perspective of another of the seven others in those two groups.

So it's a member of The Outcasts, Argus's adventuring party.
Sasha's story is fairly minimalistic; the only details that are there are directly plot relevant.
Davos's story is fleshed out, but his backstory is incredibly plot relevant, to the point where there's multiple "arcs" (arcs, being defined as basically what can be thought of as "episodes" or "chapters") covering it; not something to spoil.
Argus's backstory is literally the driving force behind the comic; almost every single event in the comic, he had some hand in, which makes the instances he isn't involved all the more unique for that fact (something lampshaded when it happens; basically his team blames him for why there are a bunch of angry people suddenly, and in those rare instances, he can truthfully say, "This one's actually not my fault!". Because mostly, it is).

Leaving it as being...
...Aria.

Her backstory does come up in pieces in the comic proper, but like the Kinas Chronicle, though there are elements that are technically spoilers, they are not "real" spoilers. It's a fairly self-contained arc, self-resolving. Her backstory is brought up, but it doesn't have an overall effect on the grander plot; it is a detail which if it was left out of the comic altogether would make no difference on the comic at all, other than not fleshing her out as much. (Haha she's a ghost she doesn't have flesh aren't I so funny.)

And the result of that is.
There's actual potential to tell a story in a format similar to that of the Kinas Chronicle, intermingling a series of text with a series of images, interwoven to be almost like a lite novel. And I could actually tell it. And today I actually expanded on her backstory, basically the whole impetus for this idea.

I knew the basics already, which I can say because they are literally how I introduce her as a character. She was taught by her father's principles, inheriting his alignment, and her mother's skills, inheriting her class. The resulting build of a Lawful Good Rogue was ill-suited for survival because a sense of honor and duty motivated her to not run away when running away would have been the tactic allowing her to survive. (And is a move perfectly viable for Good characters that're rogues, so long as they have a plan to take the enemy down that doesn't involve a head-on confrontation, their weakness.)

I knew that the specific form of the way she died forever cursed her, killing her but preventing her from moving on to the afterlife, and that she's thus (justifiably) worried about Cessation of Existence due to Undeath Always Ending (she doesn't know those tropes by name--though Argus helpfully tells her them--but she knows their ideas well enough).

I knew she had been dead for a long time, but not long enough to be older than Argus.

I knew that the village she was haunting was indebted to her for her sacrifice, tolerating her antics as a result and seeing her as mostly harmless aside from her pranks.

I knew she was orphaned at a young age.

But that left a lot of ground uncovered. Specifically, everything from when she was orphaned up to the point where she died, which if you remember from the above, is a full...well, not specific date, but at least 12 years because her parents died before she was a teenager, leaving her to fend for not only herself but her younger brother (who I knew existed, and was alive some umpteenth years later).

And I basically invented the story of that gap today.
All of it 100% original, and I know for a fact not contradicting existing canon. (The way outside of this hypothetical "Aria Chronicles" being introduced to the comic proper? That might, albeit only slightly, requiring minor rewrites of very specific sections of an already-existing plot. But the content of the story? Nope, all original to today and fitting in line with content made prior to today.)

I kinda want to make it.

In fact, I really want to make it, but because it requires an intermingling of (as I envision it) computer-typed text and hand-drawn art edited in whatever I have available (which on this computer...is the MS Paint that comes with Windows 10)...

...I probably never will.

OH WELL AT LEAST THE IDEA IS REALLY FUN. (And in some areas, funny.)

I've not been blogging about it, but I've had some pretty revolutionary insights into things lately, and I mean that in absolute sincerity; if I were actually able to properly unpack the thoughts I had, they would be pretty darn insightful and actually make you pause and think. And if nothing else, give good insight into my mind.

Now I ultimately decided. I didn't want to spend the time/effort making those blogs. I had other things I wanted to blog about which were unrelated, took less time to talk about, and so on and so forth. Things which I could unpack quickly, easily, flawlessly.

So on Wednesday, I didn't give an expansion on my reflections about fear.

Yesterday, I didn't give a narration about the nature of time (and by extent, reality--short version, time in the narration given both exists and doesn't exist, everywhere and nowhere, is an objective constant that can be measured yet subjective illusion subject to the whims of the subconscious, without this being paradoxical because there's a logic to how it works; there's more to it than that and that's a poor explanation of the thoughts but like I said I didn't want to bother with the full version and still don't).

But today, I had a thought about failure, and this one I did want to share.

Failure is fun.
Now, I realize the Dwarf Fortress meme of "Losing is Fun!" exists, along the lines of "There's no winning, only losing, so make the loss as spectacular as is possible", more or less.

That's not what I mean.

What I mean by that is.

Failure is seen as a bad thing, but in it, there comes a blessing.
When you succeed, it is seen as a good thing, but with success comes a curse.
Failure helps you learn, whereas success can cause bad habits to form, but even this is not what I am referring to.

I'm more referring to what the effects of failure and success are, long-term.

Continuously failing can be a test of character, causing someone to either break and give up or push themselves with a drive until they succeed, but this is not what I am talking about, either.

What I more mean. Is that with failure, comes an expectation--or rather. A lack thereof. With failure, there is freedom. Failure gives you the luxury of choice, at every step. Do I continue, do I give up, as a start, but. I'm more talking about. When you fail.

You are under no obligations.

The results are right there, failure, in front of you. So if you've failed at everything. Then there's no obligation to do anything. What you do with that failure is up to you, allowing you the opportunity to do what you want--even if what you want to do is continue to fail.

That might seem like something nobody would want. Who'd deliberately want to continue to fail at a task which it's possible to succeed in? But therein lies the realization. Sometimes, continuing the task and failing it is the fun part, because it is the task itself which is fun--and succeeding at the task would make it no longer be the same level of fun.

This is one reason why I think so many people are perfectionists. They find flaws in what was done, to give themselves an excuse to call it a failure--so that they can do it again, but better.

Because the flip side of failure is success.
With success comes obligations.

If you succeed once, you are continuously haunted by that success: "I did it before, so why can't I do it again?" plagues all too many people. More than that, by having succeeded, it is expected that you will succeed again. People hold you to the level of quality you have shown you can do. If you do good, then you are under pressure to always do that good.

Once you have succeeded.
Once you have made your name.
Suddenly, everything is viewed in the lens of that success, compared to it.
"This is better than that".
"This is worse than that".

But when you have nothing but failures, there's a level of equality to it. A failure is still a failure, and while some failures are more spectacular (and I mean that in both senses it can be used in, in that they are massive failures or look-better-but-still-are-failures) than others, they still have more or less the same treatment.

A failure is a failure.

But when you succeed.
Suddenly, everything must be a success, viewed in terms of "less successful than previous" or "more successful than previous". And while some of these metrics are objective, plenty are subjective. Artists, creators, writers, and so on and so forth in particular are what I am getting at here; when they have gained renown for their work, their future projects are compared to these past projects, and inevitably, some will shower praise while others, criticism.

And it was this that made me understand why.

Why I am okay with living my life as a failure--and even seek failure out.

​There's a trope for this: Victory Is Boring. But it's a trope for good reason; it's true to life. There is less excitement in success, because with success comes obligation, comes expectation, comes pressure, comes the chains of the weight of the world bearing down on you. When you succeed, you are burdened by it.

But with failure, when you fail. You can forever continue to fail. You never need to succeed as a failure, because you can continue to fail over and over again and nothing changes. Nobody expects differently. There's no pressure to succeed, because you have failed. There's only the minimal burdens of the world coming from the bare necessities of survival. (You need to eat, you need to hydrate, you need to have shelter, and these things in the modern world come from some form of success in some endeavor for the most part.)

And I realized that this is why I am acting the way I do.

I have, for the longest time, lacked the drive to succeed.
I have, for the longest time, been dreaming up ideas and then not following through with making them reality.
I've been figuring this as being my bipolar disorder for as long as I've had that diagnosis: manic episodes for creativity, depression for how the idea dies out.

But there's a constant throughout this, and it's not just in my creative works. In mafia games, in all aspects of my life.

I have proven, time and time again, that when I put my mind to it and really try, there is almost no challenge I can't overcome. (I am human so I have limitations, but these are much fewer than most, especially myself, would assume.)

I have proven, time and time again, that I can do this, I can do that.

I have proven it as a proof of concept. Yes, it's viable. Yes, I can do it.

So why don't I do it more often?

Why do I lack the investment to try?

Why do I not make the effort?

Because if I made the effort, I might actually succeed--and that's something I don't actually want.

Well. Obviously. There are some things that I'd rather succeed on. (Namely, transitioning; living with my girlfriend.) But by and large. "It's the journey which matters, not the destination" is a saying for good reason, and it is specifically this that I am getting at.

The destination of success isn't actually worth anything to me (except on the few things it is; see above).
The journey is what I have fun with.
But the only way to ensure I keep on the journey.
Is if I don't reach success--and thus, fail.

So as I said.

Failure is fun.

And that's why I will forever be one.
I'll probably, realistically speaking, never succeed. Not even on the projects I most want to, like Phyrra and Cyrus. And because I'll keep inventing new ideas and never put in the time/effort to find out solutions for the technical difficulties in my modding, I'll never succeed in perfecting my mod.

But I'm at peace with that, because I am okay with living my life that way.
It comes with its own hardships. It comes with its own trials. It comes with the difficulties, the pains of knowing that my vision will never reach others. It comes with financial difficulty and making the few things I still want to actively pursue succeeding at, harder to get. (It's easier to succeed in transitioning and living with your girlfriend if you have succeeded at getting a steady, well-paying income, for instance, so it's harder on me that I can't get that easily.)

But it is not without its perks.

And honestly I actually think this is a contributing factor to why most people don't "succeed" in life.
Not everyone is famous.
Nobody achieves most of their dreams.
Everyone has a little creativity in them, and the vast majority of the human population has an overabundance of it; almost every single person in existence has some sort of creative thing they'd love to make. Music. Songs. Poems. Stories. Games. And so on and so forth. Yet only some of them so much as start, and of those that start, only the smallest of fractions of them succeed.

Most people are unknowns.
Most people are failures.
Most people never make it.

But I think the reason why.
Is because even if they never consciously make this connection.
On some subconscious level.
They know it, and are happy with who they end up being, even if it's a nobody.

For most of my life I've always struggled with the dilemma of feeling like I am half-nobody, half-extraordinary. That I am stuck in the middle of being ordinary and being special, that I am not normal enough to really fit in with more normal individuals and yet not special enough to make it big as a star, not talented enough to become the famous person I've always dreamed about being.

Yet I think that with this realization, I can be more at peace with myself.

I still won't ever fully "normalize", because with my brain wiring that's not possible.
I still won't ever succeed.

But now I feel a sense of serenity about it, that this is not a bad thing. That this is an alright place to be in.

You might think that this would mean, thanks to this realization, I'd give up on some things.
Oh no.
Furthest thing from it.
I'm doubling down on doing them.
Even knowing that I'm going to fail, I'm going to do them--specifically because I know I'm going to fail!
(The mythbusters quote about "Failure is always an option"? More like 'failure is always the ultimate option'.)

Honestly if I actually succeeded at this point I wouldn't know what to do with it.
But I'll still try. Over and over and over again.
My lot in life likely won't ever change, especially given my lack of drive to do so since I'm mostly content (aside from hating my dad) to live as I am.
But I'll still try.
Because the failure from trying is the most fun I can have.

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.

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!

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!