Aside from how I have work tomorrow and need to get up at 6 am (so there's pragmatic reasons for it as well), I simply am feeling really really tired. I can't drink coffee, I can't nap without screwing up my sleep, and words are having that blend-together effect, soooooooo.

I'll need to hold on for an hour yet.

Wait, me making an entry before midnight?

Why yes. Yes, I am indeed making an entry before midnight, to help facilitate the process of going to bed at midnight. Usually when I say "bed at midnight", by the time I run all my errands (blogging, pills, and petting the kitteh), it's usually 10-30 minutes past midnight.

Soyeah, earlier blog today.

Today was obviously mother's day and doubled as our birthday celebration for my younger sister. There were plenty of good times to be had (ha I typo'd that as 'bed' nice subconscious telling me what I already know I want), and we watched Spaceballs.

I always wish that I had a way of sharing the events of a typical family night with those that I'd want to share them with, especially on days where the family doesn't end up discussing stuff like politics. (Which is usually done really late at night when my older sister and I are both out of the conversation and usually when my younger sister isn't in attendance, i.e., mostly done between my brother and my dad.) Especially the full family nights with all six members rather than partial ones with four or five of them.

They are just...special family moments, hilarious, fun, unique, irreplaceable. It's something that if you have it in your life, you just know it, you just get what I am referring to, but if it's something you haven't had, it's literally impossible to get, to experience, to understand it even if given vivid descriptions.

Families have in-jokes and those in-jokes aren't understood by outsiders, but even without in-jokes involved, even on a night to night basis, you just have to be there to appreciate it all, and even when I sleep, even when I park myself on the computer (a place where I am usually seen--not entirely unjustifiably so--as "out of it"), I legitimately do.

Also it helps that tonight during family night I felt particularly sexy. In a feminine way. I don't know why, I'm pretty sure I looked anything but, but I felt that way and feeling that way while with family is a rarity to be treasured, given how it normally doesn't--can't--exist.

Speaking of femininity, I felt fairly feminine today at work, too. It's kinda weird. When I first started wearing my underarmor shirt and pants, I felt incredibly feminine when doing so. However, today was the first time I was without, and I felt more feminine without than I was with, in spite of me being quite positive that I got a boost to my femininity when I initially started wearing the look.

Similarly, I am quite positive that when I initially started wearing my V-neck + sweatshirt combo at work for warmth, I felt more feminine...but when I stopped using that look, when I went back to the t-shirt, there was that very same boost in femininity.

It's weird. Rationally, logically, it's probably that the change from the norm feels different and that difference feels empowering, feels feminine to me. But I personally like to hold the theory--however implausible it may be--that each and every time is a permanent increase in femininity. That I was feminine when I began, and slightly more feminine when I wore the sweatshirt, then became more feminine when I removed the sweatshirt, and became more feminine when I started wearing the underarmor, and became even more feminine today when removing it and going back to just the t-shirt as I was before.

It's a nice thought to be having, anyway.

Apparently, when I'm tired like this, my mind wanders more easily. While that isn't very productive for making a coherent blog and leaves each subject in less detail than I intended, I believe a fortunate side-effect of it is an overall longer blog from multiple thoughts I'd otherwise have not blogged about; I thought this blog would be a paragraph or two and just look at what it is now.

Butyeah. That's my blog for today. Will probably also have my pills a bit early, so I can instantly plop down to sleep the second midnight rolls around.

So I was planning to say that I had binge-read the entirety of EGS in less than a week (I forget when I started, might've been Monday), but I'm not technically there, yet in spite of it being Thursday. Darn close, but not quite.

I'm blogging about it now though, because relevant?

​The author talking about his experiences compared to a list of autism symptoms. And me going.
"...Huh. The author sounds like he has the EXACT same issues that *I* have."

There are many, many comics from the comic that I considered linking to my girlfriend with me just saying "...THIS IS ME", though for whatever stupid reason I ended up deciding not to in spite of so many of them being so appropriate for describing me.

And as the author says himself, him having a sort of "write what you know/I know myself best" attitude, and from this, having put aspects of himself into basically all of his characters (which I'd know of all too well because I do literally the exact same thing), that makes a lot of sense.

What I wanted to cover were things he talked about, because I don't talk about them much.
But the ironic thing is...some time near the start of this year or thereabouts, half the things he mentioned in the comic I linked I was considering blogging about anyway. And with him talking about them there, a little hard for me to not instantly stop my bingeread and instead focus on writing the blog.

I relax via movement rather than standing still--like the author, I fundamentally cannot stand still in place. It's something that not only is physically painful, but mentally excruciating so I instinctively, reactively, add in some form of movement to it to make it work.

I love pacing and always have. It is something that I do to just...relax, focus my thoughts, to just get my brain in a good mindset for doing what I want to do; many of my best ideas came from a result of pacing back and forth and then just a spark of brilliance hit and then ignited because I was allowed to play around with a calm, collected, focused mind.

Many in my family fidget, but I am by far the worst offender; I am basically never not fidgeting. If there's no object to fidget with, I make an object to fidget with. If there's nothing to make an object to fidget with, I use my own body as my fidgeting material. (Which, to be honest, can be equal parts healthy and unhealthy. I can clean out gunk and whatnot that's accumulated, but I can also rip skin off in my fidgeting without realizing what I did until after I did it.)

I did have a speech impediment when I was younger, and while I was able to overcome half my issues, my issue with stuttering never went away in spite of having spent years at it and taking lessons to try and avert it. Is the main reason why I prefer typing over speaking; I just stumble over my own words which is much harder to do when typing. (Harder. Not impossible.)

But the main thing which piqued my interest?

The mention of oversensitivity to stimuli, and specifically how that relates to the author. Obviously, I have misophonia, so I know about that oversensitivity to a select stimulus, but what he described is something that I wanted to talk about because it happens to me every day I am at work.

I thought it might just be the unique acoustics of the pool deck at work, but thinking about it, it's probably just a me thing. Or an autism thing, more specifically. I am ridiculously sensitive to certain sounds, able to make them out when nobody else can. I fundamentally cannot filter out everyone talking, and it shuts me down entirely.

I think, ages ago, years ago, I wrote a blog touching on that, in fact, now that I think about it. I likened it to the Robert Downy Jr. Sherlock Holmes film in the dining scene, where he was exposed to so many stimuli and had no way of blocking them out. (I've also used it as a descriptor as being part of what curses Sloth in Phyrra and Cyrus; he has a souped-up version of that as a permanent curse on him for his sin, making his life a living hell as a result.)

But what the author said? I can verbatim quote and have it apply to me:
And yet, somehow, I often have trouble hearing what people have said and have to ask them to repeat themselves, which I find all sorts of weird.

I have this super sensitive, hyper-awareness with my hearing, able to hear the ever so slightest of details, whose hearing is sensitive enough to not be able to drown out all of that noise...and yet...when people actually speak to me, I have no clue what they are saying most of the time. Not because I don't understand the words they're saying (though that can happen, because duh, lack of social understanding), but because I can't hear them no matter how much I try.

They can say something, I won't get it, I'll ask them to repeat themselves, I still won't get it, I ask them a third, sometimes a fourth time, and if they haven't given up on telling me what it was they were saying, maybe I hear them. (At which point, then I have to process what they said correctly, which again. Challenging, because duh.)

I'm also uncertain about the sarcasm thing. Often at work when patrons tell jokes, I might not be able to tell, in large part because of the above issue (not having heard them until they repeat it, and their repeated version of it obviously won't have the same tone as their initial version did because they're trying to make me hear it, which I guess sacrifices some of the subtextual clues, or so I hypothesize), but I was raised in a family filled with deadpan snarkers, and am myself one. (Well, as often as someone like me can be one, anyway.)

Online, in fact, snark is my signature style. I'm fond of puns and whatnot, and I often attach the emoticon ':P' to it which ruins the snark, but I am a ridiculously snarky person who as part of the snark, inherently makes use of sarcastic comments and the like.

Misunderstandings are abundant, though, moreso than they should be.

Unlike the author, though, I know for a fact that I have no sense of personal space.
I also know that I am incredibly fond of tactile feedback. Like. I am obsessive about it. I tend to not like touching people (I don't have a sense of personal space, but I just...have an aversion to touching people? But it feels mostly like I don't know if it's appropriate more than anything else, unless it's a child in which case no duh I don't want to touch the child who I know has a runny nose and does the child thing to deal with it rather than the adult thing, and I am quite aware of the hypocrisy of that given I am an adult who still does the child thing to do but I guess I'm a hypocrite in that way), and I rationally know that surfaces everywhere are littered with germs, but...

...I just...like the feeling of them, even if I know they are germ-infested. But that said...I'm kinda selective with what I touch? I only touch certain things, and otherwise leave things untouched. Some things I just instinctively reach out to touch, even if I've never touched them before; other things I instinctively reach out to touch out of established habit; yet more things I just don't touch for whatever reason even if similar things I do touch.

Soyeah.
Just...got some more perspective on things that I thought were me-things, that might in fact not actually be just-me things.

It's a really lousy workaround, and doesn't do the original image justice, but it's better than nothing.
I used my phone to snap a picture of it, which I then through a convoluted process managed to transfer to my desktop (a process involving sending it to my girlfriend even though my girlfriend is literally my only years-long consistent blog reader in that every other blog reader I know of comes and goes with the times, making it kinda pointless long-term but OH WELL).

You can tell what I mean by the camera pic not being the best, but it's at least adequate at showing the basics behind the picture and what I mean.

As a refresher, take a look at yesterday's blog both for a reference point of the prior versions of the panel and for my description of this one. You can instantly see what I mean with the face, right? Something just feels...wrong about it.

Yesterday I thought it was the mouth. Maybe the mouth is slightly too large, but otherwise I took a quick look at the art trying a tactic: look at the image with the head obscured above the mouth (so that the mouth is the only part of the face visible); look at the image with everything below the mouth obscured (so that the mouth is the only part of the face not visible); look at the image with everything.

With the first, the image didn't quite look wrong--it looked okay, it looked passable.
With the second, instantly? "OH GOD THE EYES".
For the life of me, I could not get the eyes to match.
I tried.
I really, really, really tried to get the eyes to match.
But I botched it every single time no matter what I did. I think it's her left eye (appearing on the right) being slightly out of proportion, with the edge near the outside being larger than it should?

Butyeah--you can tell that I got really lazy from pretty much just below the shoulders. Still, the head tilt--while subtle--is hopefully there, visibly. And that was one of my main goals with this.

Overall, quite pleased with this.
​So let's show them all off, side-by-side-by-side, once more for a final comparison.

Aside from how the first is colored, the second is scanned, and the third is a junk photo.
In actual terms of quality of the art itself.

I feel like this is just a logical progression--a well and true, proper, art evolution.

It's on that note that I'd like to continue on a ramble that I originally was going to start in December, near the anniversary of The Descended, back when I first found and started archive binging Grrr Power. (Which I now read as it comes out.)

A ramble which earlier this week I began to revisit, but cowarded out of following through on it--I told myself I would write the ramble while I was at work. Even figured out how to preface it. Even told myself not to get distracted. Even told myself that I'd be a coward to not do the ramble. Even told myself I'd do it if I didn't feel like doing it.

And then at home...I didn't feel like doing it, called myself a coward for not feeling like it, told myself I would do it...and in spite of all of that. In spite of saying that, in spite of knowing I wanted to blog about it, that I should blog about it, I didn't actually blog about it.

Something I kinda sorta hinted at a little bit yesterday, but didn't get into as much as I'd like.

I'm not going to start the ramble the same way I planned in December (and heck, won't even cover a fraction of the material planned then, I'm only going to cover some of it).
I'm not going to start the ramble the same way I planned it earlier this week.

I'm going to preface it by saying that the art-me was for a longest time, "missing, presumed dead".
I thought my inner artist was just...gone.
Not gone in theory. I still thought of artistic things. I still thought of artistic stuff. I visualized artistic stuff. I was an artist in mind, still--but my drive to actually draw stuff in practice? My drive to draw things out in the real world rather than my head? It was gone.

Completely gone, for the longest time, as far as I knew.
Lingering there in the back was a desire to make my ideas real...but no drive to do it--until yesterday.

So what I say might be subject to change.
The artist within me was rekindled, so it's possible other stuff will be, too.
Also this was a ramble typed before I got passing interest in League of Legends, too, so that's another aspect of me which may come back as well.

But to go into things a little bit...

​...Well. Basically...I don't know what to do.

Or more accurately...I do, I compiled a list even, I just don't know what I want to focus on doing.
The full list also included don't-wants, too.

-I want to continue with my life on the mafia site I frequent.
-I want to finish my civ 3 mod, Across the Ages - Mediterranean.
-I want to continue The Descended with all of my accrued skills/knowledge/talent/ideas since my last work on it.
-I want to continue Red Hood Rider with all my accrued skills/knowledge/talent/ideas since my last work on it.
-I want to make Phyrra and Cyrus a reality...I really want to make Phyrra and Cyrus a reality.
-I want to be a teacher.
-I want to be a housewife, raise a family. (Of course, this is optional, but it is still a want all the same since there's multiple ways it could be done.)
-I want to live with my girlfriend.
-I want to fully transition.
-I want to live a happy, rich, fulfilling life.

-I don't want a job, beyond the one I've already got.
-I don't want to live independently.
-I don't want to write (yes, surprisingly enough, I don't want to, but like I said, the artist within me was revived so you never know) pure writing. Obviously, I'd write webcomics for The Descended and/or Red Hood Rider. Obviously, I'd write for Phyrra and Cyrus. Obviously, I'd still write down ideas whenever I had them. Obviously, I'd continue writing blog entries. But I don't want to write literature. 
-I don't want to read. (Well, I've done reading recently, but reached the end of everything I was reading.)
-I don't want to game, not much anyway.
-I don't want to watch things, not really, anyway.

Mind you,
-I do want to do those things if they involve someone else (namely/chiefly my girlfriend; absolutely I want to watch things with my girlfriend and watching, sayyyyy, One Piece episodes is the highlight of my week but what I mean by "I don't want to watch things" is that without watching them with someone else e.g. my girlfriend...I don't want to spend alone-time, me-time, time with just myself and nobody else, watching them--and this also applies to games; absolutely I'll play any game for/with my girlfriend but on my own my desire is rapidly fading).

But on my own.
Just by me, with nobody else.
No encouragement, no help, just as my own thing?
I just...don't want them.

A job is a means to an end--it provides income. To achieve most of the things on the list, I recognize that pragmatically-speaking, I need a job. Transitioning is expensive. Living with my girlfriend won't be possible most likely unless I can pull my weight and not be deadweight monetarily speaking. Phyrra and Cyrus is a project I don't want to make money yet which will be absurdly expensive to make. Red Hood Rider and The Descended both won't make money (they could off of ads, but I am against making money off of them in the same way I am against making money off of Phyrra and Cyrus).

I simply need money. Our world runs on money. And while I get a fair amount from my job--it's not nearly enough. It's minimum wage. Minimum wage in a state with one of the highest minimum wages in the US, but minimum wage all the same. It's also part-time, too, making things even worse. The only reason I have more money flowing in than flowing out is because I'm not pulling my weight in terms of paying for expenses. Food, gas, house mortgage (or whatever), car maintenance, etc.; I do none of that aside from the rare instances I put a quarter of a tank in out of emergency, or stop by a fast food place because I desperately need a fix.

I know I need the money--but I don't want a job, because simply put...well, there's more than just one reason.
One, I just don't want it. Not wanting it is itself a reason, it doesn't need a justification in of itself. I am happy with my current job (well, mostly happy, anyway, about as happy as any job would be because there ain't a job in existence which I wouldn't have troubles at least equaling my own if not exceeding the ones I deal with so I know my issues are comparatively minor). I simply don't want another.

Least of all as a replacement, but even if it weren't a replacement. Even if I worked two jobs instead of one. I just...don't want to.

Two, even if I did want another job.
I don't think I can handle it.

One day of 8 hours is literally murder on me.
How on earth people manage to do 8 hours a day, five days in a row, every single week almost without fail barring extenuating circumstances and recognized-by-the-company holidays, heck if I know. But I know that I am basically catatonic doing it once a week, where even doing it once a week is too much and I am barely functioning from it, where I would be better off not working in the final home stretch of the shift.

Even if the shift is limited to 5 hours a day.
Even if between both jobs my shift is limited to 5 hours a day.

I can't handle more than 20 hours a week. Heck, even 20 is breaking me. My hard limit, by my calculations, is 18--any more than that, and I am suffering badly. I am badly, badly suffering when I work more than that amount. I simply cannot function.

Working two jobs a week, there's simply no way I'd be able to keep it under 20 hours a week.
Heck.
Even if I quit lifeguarding (and again, to reiterate, I don't want to quit my current job), at the new job there's no guarantee I'd have the job security I do here while staying under 20 hours a week.

Say what you will about my work as a lifeguard having a job where what I'm asked to do is borderline-illegal and typically unethical and often counterintuitive and even contradictory, but the simple fact is...I've worked there for five and a half years and never once been at risk of being fired, in spite of me being able to ask for work of maximum-15 and receiving it. (Mind you, I do have to specify FIFTEEN in order to get 15; specify 18 and I end up with 25, but when I specify 15 I do in fact receive fifteen-or-less, as I requested.)

I've no such guarantee at any other job--in fact, quite likely my refusal to break myself by working more than the limit of my body can handle would end up with me fired, with me having no job. I physically. cannot. work. the amounts. that most jobs ask me to. It is literally impossible.

And yet legally speaking, we talked this over with my counselor, getting disability benefits for me would also be impossible because I can't legally prove that it's impossible for me to work that much. More complicated than that, I know that's something which people will try to pick apart, can't really explain it properly but trust me when I say that there's nuances involved where basically, if I was incredibly lucky and waited literally years I might be able to possibly receive help in some areas (e.g. housing I think?), but that what I actually need, extra money more than what I get now...

...I can't get from the government.
And yet I can't get it from a job.

A job is a means to an end, an end I desperately need, yes, but I just...can't do it physically, and don't want to do it either.
Plus.
Even if I did want it and even if I physically could do it.
There's a total paralysis in what jobs to actually do; I wouldn't know what to pick and choose even knowing these criteria. And even if someone literally spoonfed me a job--it'd require me to follow through on it and that's something I just...am not really...well. Invested in doing.

This is one of the things holding me back from pursuing an actually potentially viable teaching job in spite of wanting to teach (but more on that below)--I just know that in spite of having a passion to teach and wanting to teach, that there's just an utter freeze, an utter lack of will, to push forward and take the plunge in because for some reason that idea of having a job I just don't want.

And I can't make myself want it.

Especially since that job?
That job, which is a means to an end?

As far as my family is concerned, that job is so that I can take the steps to live independently.

...But what they fail to consider is...
...Me living independently? It's what they want. It's what they are pushing for. When they frame the question the wrong way, they get the illusion that it is something I want. Because living independently is a means to an end, it is more or less something I'd need to do to not be deadweight if I got to live with my girlfriend, to not kill my girlfriend from stress overload, to not have my girlfriend have a panic attack when I'm out of site, and so on and so forth.
It is also a safeguard in case I am suddenly kicked out of the house by my dad; if I know how to live independently, then I can survive on my own with difficulty.

But while it is a nice safeguard. And while it is something that would teach me how to be able to support in my own way my girlfriend rather than just be deadweight. I don't want it.
It's not something I desire.
Nothing in my life is inherently better with me independent.
Me being independent enables me to transition, sure--by proxy of not being dependent on my dad.
But that's not something which is a given.

It's not "independence = can transition, dependence = can't transition".
I can be independent and lack the means to transition, and I can be dependent on someone other than my dad and still have the means to transition.
The two aren't linked in that way.

So I just...I don't see the point?
Why am I supposed to be independent?
Because it's something that people "should" do?
Because it's something normal people do, especially by the age of 25?
Because it's something that would convenience others?

It's just...none of that is about me, now, is it?
Like I said--the only reason I see to be independent is to teach me the skills so that I'm not deadweight to my girlfriend, so that I can actually help out and manage some things on my own...but those skills don't require me to be independent, do they? Independence is the quickest, easiest way to teach them, sure, I guess...but it isn't the only way to teach them.

So if I can get those skills in other ways more suited to me...and I lack reasons of my own to seek independence...
...Why would I want it?

I just don't.

There's then my lack of desire to write.
You may recall that my flashdrive containing my writing broke years ago.
It's still broken, still hasn't been fixed, frankly I think my brother forgot it even existed, wrote it off as a lost project then didn't return it or something like that.

That's no excuse to not write.

I can, and have, remade stories from scratch.
Heck, because I am overly fond of rewrites, it's actually a specialty of sorts.
I can, and have, come up with dozens of story ideas. (Most compelling of all, the Worm-inspired Quadraverse story I owe you rambles--plural--about due to having expanded it multiple times since you last heard about it. And it'd be in exactly that format, a book, not a webcomic, not a game, not a show, a book.)

I can't stop my brain from coming up with dozens, hundreds, of ideas, nor would I ever want to. I enjoy those story ideas, I love fleshing them out, I enjoy talking about them, I enjoy making their plot twists, enjoy creating chronology, characters, and so on and so forth...

...But I just...
...Have an utter lack of desire to actually write.

I once came close.
I came close to creating a forum thread, recently, where I would tell people, basically, "I am looking to write, and want some writing prompts to give me a direction to write. I write as much as I can, before then requesting another prompt, and will keep going on this for as long as I can", more or less.
Figured out the rules and everything.
What my starting point would be.
What sorts of things I was looking for.
And so on and so forth.

Almost did it.

...But didn't.

Not because I forgot.

Because I lost interest.

I just lost interest in doing it.
And I have no interest in writing any new stories.
And for that matter, no existing stories.
The loss of my flashdrive, then, I realized was nothing but an excuse.
I was pissed at the time. Royally ticked off. Bummed out, in despair, at the loss.
But I could have recovered from it.

It was a choice not to.

Because right now?

The writer within me is dead.

Like I said, that's the status my artist within me was until just yesterday, so that could change.

But as of right now.

I don't want to write.

Because the writing me is dead right now.
At least the novelwriting, story-writing me.

Similarly--I don't really want to read things on my own.
I read, browse, TVTropes.
I keep up to date on webcomics--more out of obligation than anything.
Yes, I've binge-read a few webcomics recently.

But all of that? It's mostly enrichment. Mostly inspiration. It's mostly things which give me ideas, which make me feel better, which are part of another aspect: they are part of me living a full, happy, enriched life because they give me a degree of cheap pleasure, but it's not something I have any particular investment in. They're just time-wasters. Wasting time, rather than something I truly did because of a deep desire to delve into the world I was presented with.

The magic exists--and then it doesn't.
Worm is a great example of this.
I mentioned in my blog recently, either yesterday or on Friday, that I finished reading Worm.
And more significantly.
I did something like 28 chapters in only a couple months or so...
...And then stopped.
I just...didn't read.
I had plenty of times I could have read.
But for months. (Well, slight exaggeration.)
It just sat there, unfinished.

And then the magic was briefly back, just long enough for me to finish it in less than 48 hours. (Maybe less than 24, I forget if it was Wednesday or Thursday that I started but I'm pretty sure I finished before Friday?)
But it's gone again.

It comes and it goes, but it's not consistently here.
It was here consistently long enough to drive me forward to read something like 28 chapters in a remarkably short time. (I got some internet-stares when I said how much I had read in the short duration I had, akin to "...HOW", with them flabbergasted that I could read so much in so little time especially given that I read many comments too.)

But then it wasn't.
And it isn't, again.

So overall, reading's just not something I strongly have right now.

It is useful for enrichment, for entertainment, for boredom-suppressing, for lack-of-better-ideas activities.
But that's about it.

Ditto, gaming. It is equally a time waster, and due to a small selection pool of games...far less enriching of my life, other than providing entertainment and relaxation and a distraction from doing things that are more important to do.
I still game.
But when I game, it's not so much that I want to do it, as much as I defaulted to doing it.
I ran out of ideas, so I did it because I couldn't think of anything better to do and it was the thing that was most appealing or rather more accurately, least-unappealing.

Again, I'd like to reiterate.

These change when it comes to having a partner, having it not be just me.

I would read just about anything if I had someone to trade comments with about it, facepalming, screaming, making snarky commentary, the like, about it. And I don't mean in the sense of a forum where you just look at comments, place your own, respond to existing comments, e.g. on a webcomic with whatever posting method the webcomic uses (for instance disqus). I mean more in real time, where we can have a real conversation and bring attention to things the other might have missed.

That is fun. That is something that I would always be down for, that I would always enjoy. That I'd always find immense pleasure in.

I would play just about anything if I had companionship in it. Someone watching the stream of a game I play, preferably in real time, again to make comments about how much of an idiot I am being, how stupid that move I made was, how much I deserved what was coming to me, etc.

Someone to play an online game with me, where we could both fail together, repeatedly, because of my incompetence getting us massacred over and over again. Or, alternatively, if we stack things in our favor to make it nigh-impossible to lose...managing to win a victory albeit one where I didn't pull my weight. Or, alternatively, where we play against each other and I totally let them win, honestly, couldn't just be because I am absolutely utterly incompetent and they are just better than me, nope, not my inexperience, totally me letting them win.

Any of that? Yeah, that's fun. Never tire of that. Never gets old. Never would stop with it.

But on my own. With no feedback. With no network...I'm getting tired of it. I'm not creative, I'm not inventive, I fall back to the same habits and do not explore much. I play the same things I have played...and I basically just. Don't really have much motivation to play them anymore.

And similarly, watching falls under that same umbrella. Sure, watching things with others is amazing, is great, is something I want to do always and enjoy doing. A real highlight of my week, uplifting, amazing, basically something that gives me great, immense, immeasurable, pure, sheer, joy at having done, leaving me happy and fulfilled.

But on its own...well. Watching some things can be useful to gain inspiration. It can motivate me to do my own things, to make my own work, to get ideas from what I watched on things that I can improve on in my life and in my creativity...but that's about it.

I don't really want those to be central parts of my own, personal, me by myself, life.
They can exist in the peripherals, sure, I guess.
But they shouldn't be what my life revolves around.

What should my life revolve around?
Well, probably not half the things I want, but whatever it should revolve around should be something I want.

And again.
I want to continue being a part of the mafia forum I play on--because it is, like it or not, a fundamental part of my identity. It is a piece of me, a rather large part. When I gave up, progressively more and more, on every other site...at the end. Even after having given up on ComicFury...I stayed there. I stayed there when I stayed nowhere else.

It keeps me grounded, it keeps me sane, it gives me my one iota of social interaction and is the only source of resources/support network I have readily, easily, available access to. Pathetic, sure, sad, yeah, but that's simply the truth. They are all I have built up.

Doesn't help that they serve as a very nice source of enlightenment, so to speak--they have a far, far, far, far, FAR more open-minded view of the world than I'd otherwise get. I mean, liberal as liberal gets is a fairly dominant majority there, sure, yeah...but I need that to help counterbalance the fact that my family is as conservative as conservative gets.

I need reminders that my family is racist, that my family is bigoted, that my family's religious intolerance is not okay, that my family's politics are not to be blindly sheeped, that I should take their words with heavy grains of salt. And the site's one of the better places to give it to me.

Not the best, admittedly, because they have a bit of a problem with the "if you don't agree with this, you're part of the problem" mentality, and they're not aiming to educate people nor am I directly looking for them to educate me and other issues and the like, but it's still exposure to an opposite view to what my family (and by 'my family', I mostly mean "my dad's toxic, backwards views"), but I fully credit the site for being one of the largest influences in me not being an echo of my father.

Without them, I'd be the worst trash of the worst trash, most likely. A despicable human being that honestly the world would be better off without having around as a whole, one spouting hatred at all times at everything not appearing to be part of it. I was headed down that road, and while I'm not fully on the road opposite of it (to the point where some probably would still argue I am those things, a despicable human being that would be better off not around, an opinion I can't entirely dispute because yeah, I am kinda trash), that I am at least trying to stay further and further off of it is something I credit to the site.

Sure, yes. The internet is a toxic cesspool of vitriol, and this site is no different. That exists, in abundance, and perhaps moreso than on most sites. Certainly seems it is filled to the brim with those hostile, divisive emotions. And yet...in spite of that. It is not all negative. It is not all bad. I know that my place on there is largely a negative one where I cause more problems than I help...

...But in spite of that...I still want to be a part of it, because it is part of my identity.

It was one of the two places I came out on as being a girl. (The other being ComicFury.)
It is one of the main places that helped me build my confidence in my femininity, that helped me build my identity as a woman. That helped me find who I am as a person.

And it's something that I crave.
Even if I wasn't part of that site.
I don't think I'd be able to give up mafia altogether.
It's just ingrained in me. Second nature to me. As both a player and as a game host/moderator/insertterminologyhere.
If I was on any site that had mafia, I would play it--I wouldn't go out of my way to sign up for a site with it just to play it, but if I were already a member of a site I visited that had it, heck yes I would. (Which would be a liiiiiittle bit problematic since I know sites that I frequent such as Kongregate have sections for it.)

Heck.
If I was on any site that had a section dedicated to playing games...and they didn't already have mafia?
...I would start it for them.
I would figure out what I'd need to adjust, what I'd need to make it work, and then I'd make it work.

Only way it'd be possible for a complete detox from mafia would be to cut me off from any site that has any source of games on it. And I mean, any source. Doesn't need to be forum-based; if they have a chat client that has chat game support? I'd find a way to make a chat-based mafia game.

Because I think in mafia games.

I have it that ingrained in me, that I convert experiences into mafia games and mechanics. I turn ideas I see into mafia-centered things. Many of my ideas which started as a mafia game can be converted to something not a mafia game...but it also works vice-versa just as frequently, where something I thought of as a different idea becomes a mafia game because the mafia game suits the idea more naturally.

I've been doing mafia for over ten years--not half my life, but 40% of it. 2/5ths of my life, spent on the forum game. That experience sticks with you your whole life. It's ingrained in my brain. It doesn't go away. It's instinctive on every level. The good (what little there is), the bad, the ugly, it's all there, as part of me.

And because in spite of its flaws, in spite of all the things there which are sour, which there is bitterness about, I genuinely believe in the community, I genuinely feel like it is a special place, I genuinely feel like it is a place which is more good than it is bad. It's got lots of bad. Lots and lots and LOTS of bad. But the good is just...stronger, more empowering, more rewarding.

I want to make more of that good, there. I want to do what I can to make there a better place, one piece at a time. The site is, in many ways, a bit of a reflection on humanity. It is deeply flawed, it is deeply troubled, there is lots of hatred, there is lots of divides, but there is also lots of...everything positive about humanity. Bonding, creativity, socializing, humor, love, friendship, unity, you name it. 

I could drop it. (There are two situations which would cause me to; if my girlfriend asked me to, in spite of my attachment to it, I'd leave in a heartbeat, wrap everything up as hastily as is possible and then simply depart and never return again, OR, if I on a fundamental level felt the site itself had betrayed my trust. I've felt betrayed before, but that's not something that I consider the site betraying me so much as something else having done so.)

But given the choice, I don't want to. It's helped build me as a person. You can leave sites like that behind you...but it's not something you ever want to do, and this is no different. My investment, my attachment, is such that barring either condition coming true...I just...want to keep it as a part of my life.

I don't want it to consume my life.
I don't want it to be all of my life.
I don't want it to be the most important aspect of my life.
Heck, when I wrote these down, it was almost practically in the order of least important to most important. (Almost. Not quite. Not really, but you can kinda see how the later ones are more important to me than the earlier ones. It's not an exact list, being a teacher is a lower priority than my creative projects, but the reason it's lower on the list is that it has a direct lead-in to talking about the others, which you'll see if you keep reading, BUT I DIGRESS.)

So it's not an important aspect of my life.
But I want to continue keeping it AS an aspect of my life.

On that note--I want to finish my Civ 3 Mod, Across the Ages - Mediterranean.
This one's not really that important...but it's a bit of a pet project. There'd be a sense of accomplishment, of, "I did it!", and it's a bit of an education, a personal pursuit of mine, a bit of a healthy hobby of building something tangible, that you can look at as concrete, and which could lead somewhere.

Would be unlikely to lead anywhere, but could lead somewhere, in that even though it doesn't teach me coding or anything it still teaches me basic structure of how to make a game idea more or less real. It gives me the layout of the sorts of things, the details, I'd need to work out. Structure of the game, of map layout/creation, of units, of balance, of tech trees, of resources, the like.

The knowledge generated from this is poor due to me being lousy at it, sure, but it's still some sort of grasped knowledge, which I'd get better at with time and practice. And it is knowledge which does have a way of transferring over to other projects, especially if I begin messing around with things I thought I wouldn't be messing around with (such as pcx files).

The intricacies, the nuances, of making my scenario what I want it to be, would teach me how I could go about making ideas that are my own game proper, into reality, because honestly this mod basically is a game of its own at least in scope, in scale, in ambition, in ideas poured into it.

I wouldn't even probably play it, beyond playtesting it. See the game section above for why. If I wanted to make something of my life...I just wouldn't have the time to keep playing it over and over again, even though if I succeeded at making it the way I dreamed of it, I'd have the ability to.

The ability to play it over and over again and enjoy it, that? That if I could actually achieve it with the full scope and scale of my ideas, would make it all worth it in the end. So it's something I want to do, but it's not something that is at all critical. I still have desire to do it even though I work on it less often than I used to (used to be just about every day), but that's more from increased passions elsewhere I didn't know I still had.

I want to go back to The Descended, from my revival of interest there.
This is something I was going to touch on in my December blog, which was near the anniversary of The Descended. (Remember, The Descended was spawned as an idea around Christmas Break, on vacation; we were in Oregon when on my grandfather's antique computer I drew the first sprite iterations of The Outcasts, The Elementals, and The Latens. I forget the exact date, but it was somewhere in that range.)

The exact blog was spawned during the time I said I had an "epic year-end blog", promised it was coming soon, procrastinated, said I'd do it, but never actually did, with it never having materialized. There was so much more to it when I wrote it, but one of the core aspects of it was a scary thought to have.

The Descended, with my thematic nature of liking 12, had about 12 "Arcs" of content.
Each "Arc" is, by my approximation of modern standards (not original standards), ~30-40 pages long.
The Descended was, from the very beginning, at its original iteration and with each reboot, each revision, always at every single point, envisioned as releasing once a week.

One comic a week.

The Descended was the first webcomic I had which had clear start and end points and material strewn in-between.

I had other story-based webcomics--some I even knew the direction of!
But I didn't have clear ends to them. Only generic ideas of where I was heading with things.

The Descended was the first, and in some senses, still the best, at getting me a story-based webcomic that didn't just have a simple direction. It had a clear, definitive, unambiguous, ending planned to it. (Mind you, not at the get-go. Took time for that to materialize, until July if I recall correctly which is why I consider July 23rd to be an "anniversary" for The Descended, and consider the original December launch date an anniversary.)

My original plot, I lost on my old old laptop. You know, back when my old laptop was called my laptop, I referred to an old laptop? Well now it's not the old laptop because my previous laptop now is the old laptop, so it's the old old laptop. Or maybe it goes back even further? Actually, it does.
My original plot was on my old old old laptop, a laptop so old I pretty much forget it even existed in the first place. That, or it was on a desktop. It involved many more gags than the current plot, many more out-of-universe mentions, far more self-awareness, and even toyed with the idea of there being a on-the-other-side-of-screen (i.e. YOU the READER...except, GAMER) character, a gamer, controlling the actions and being dissatisfied with the outcome, "loading" to redo them...and at least at one point the characters in-universe refusing to revert.

I don't remember the details, never wrote it all and frankly I'm glad I didn't because while that was a valid direction I could have taken things in, The Descended would have been far, far, far worse off for it. I'm much, much happier with the direction I decided to take things in when I got my next plot.

Which I still didn't finish.
And which was on my old old laptop.
But which, critically?

I mostly have memorized.

The finer details, fine points, exact specifics, I don't remember--but I remember far more than I don't. It's ingrained in me as second nature. Mind you, there's not total recall. I have to focus on a moment to remember that moment, but I can generally remember more or less the structure of all the ideas I wove, the intricate narrative between the four protagonist groups of four and their pasts from before the start of the comic.

And I can tell you that works out to be about 12 arcs, with each arch being about 30-40 pages long.
The first arc to introduce you to three of the main groups and a little about them, the second arc to get more into the details, third arc to have the outcasts have their first encounter as a team while the background of the elementals and latens is explored, fourth arc the three groups meeting, and then further arcs for exploring the villains and such. Davos with an arc, Aria with an arc (so that's six), an arc detailing the rise of the fourth group (so that's seven), at least two arcs detailing miscellaneous plotlines where each character gets some growth, and then at least two arcs for the climax (that'd put it at eleven meaning I'm either merging two separate arcs or forgetting an arc, but I'm in the approximate right range, here).

What makes this all be scary?

Well do the math, here.

I took down the original page, but the original date has been preserved.
The Descended's first comic was released on December 28, 2009.
Over 9 years ago; near the end of this year, we'll be seeing The Descended's tenth birthday, and at the time I wrote the blog, I knew we were looking at its ninth.

There are 52 weeks in a year.
Do the math I've presented.
12 arcs, each ~30-40 pages long?
360-480 pages.

One page a week?
If I kept to one page a week, in nine years, I'd be able to do 468 pages.

Now assuming every arc together ended up being less than 480, then I'd be finished with The Descended.
The Descended would be done.
DONE.
Finished, completed, start to finish, a comic that was actually wrapped up and concluded, rather than on an indefinite, indeterminable hiatus.

Now, granted.
One page a week, the original schedule, is an unrealistically high goal given my innate abilities and how busy I was.
Also granted.
I improved the comic in 2012, 2013, and 2014; those dates represent more accurately the places you can call launches for the comic proper compared to the original.

Butstill.

The scary thought?

The Descended is an unfinished comic I put so much effort into, only to end up wasting it, because of stupid reasons.
Originally, writer's block, leading to a rewrite and generating a script.
Then writer's block in how to make the script real, culminating in the death of the computer.
Then in artist's indecisiveness.
Then for the stupidest of stupid reasons, because I didn't have the worldbuilding finished.
The World of Soano, The Descended's setting, is an RPG Mechanics 'Verse--one which using RPG Mechanics Terminology, but which is not self-aware of being in a comic and do not consider themselves in a game (because they aren't).

This is a rare combo, but it's exactly what I chose to use. To them, they use terms like mana, charisma, wisdom, dump stats, the same way we might talk about computers, food, health, cars, whatever. It's just part of their world, of Soano.

I didn't finish making the mechanics--I wanted it so that the World of Soano was one where anyone could run a functional whatever-they-want using it. A tabletop RPG, a video game, a webcomic, a story, I wanted the World of Soano to be accessible and usable by all, not just me. So I wanted to build the system for it...and I never finished it, and I put the comic on hold while I tried.

Stupid reasons.
Stupid, stupid reasons to stop the comic.
The hiatuses were never for that officially, because I was busy, because I couldn't keep up with my life, but it still contributed to killing the comic.

And yet.

I would be done with it if I hadn't quit.

Or if not done...close to.
I would be nearing the end of it.
I would be getting ready to wrap things up.

And yet.

Instead of that.

I get a comic that never started.

In spite of how there is now a revival of interest.
And new ideas.
Yes, those ideas are a bit "draw and discard".
Some knowledge of The Descended is irrepairably lost forever. I'll never get the finer details back, I'm sure some plot threads I devised are entirely Lost Forever, in spite of how good they were. The plot I had for The Descended was a magnificent one, one which was funny and yet told rich stories with great character depth and which went into the backgrounds of them and showed their personalities, all of them, on full, the entire way.

You got a bunch of compelling villains, too, who were largely sympathetic in spite of being antagonists to the four groups. I've forgotten all but a handful (literally, can count them on a single hand; the big bad, two who have personal ties to characters, a third who has a tie to another character, and a fourth whose final battle I remember vaguely but I remember literally nothing else).

But I've also gained things like the Aria chronicle. Her basic background was in the plot from the get-go. I knew that the revelation about her lineage would be there, but the story was all in the present/future; it didn't delve into the past at all. That whole story would've never existed, and yet now it does in full, because I toy with getting into Aria's mindset quite often (she's fun to think as and fun to interact with).

And frankly...losing ideas? The ultimate excuse I put forward for stopping The Descended?

Was just an excuse.
It wasn't a justified reason to halt things. I remembered it, how hard would it have been to just type it up again and make a better backup? I stopped because I wanted to stop...

...But I've regretted it ever since then.
Always wanting to unstop it. To revive it. To come back to it. To do it again.

Heck.

One of the things I gained was a basic map OF The World of Soano. Soano's shape was originally incredibly vague, but now I know what it looks like. (Well not by memory, but I have the paper in my room and can locate it fairly quickly to reference.)

And using that basic map.

I was able to map out the exact geography of where our protagonists begin their journey.
And even drew up a few pages for a hypothetical reboot of the update that vastly improved the reboot of the reboot of the original. (I think that's how many I did? Might be one more reboot in there?)

I could make it be amazing.

Absolutely stunning.

I know how to draw all the characters better than I ever did, in spite of having not drawn most of them in like five years minimum in some cases.

I could fix the gaps in the mechanics, patch them up.
I could make it coherent.
I could finish what I started.
I could do everything I failed to do then, now, with my current skill sets.
I know I could do it, because independently I've done those sorts of things on my own.

It'd take time, it'd take planning, but I know I could make it work, and dangit.

I want to.
Even though I know it'd take time.
Effort.
And ten years to see fruition.
I know that the longer I wait now.
The longer it'll be for those ten years to come to fruition.
So I want to do it sooner rather than later.

​And you know what else this applies to?

The thing inspiring me to make this ramble?

Thaaaaaat's right!

Red Hood Rider is all of the above, and more.

When we had easter, a result of that was me organizing a lot of stuff.
Part of that was recovering my old never-made December blog entry, but another part of it was uncovering the Episode 1 artwork (which was all drawn on paper) that I'd brought out ages ago to use as a reference and never returned to my room.

It had degraded to some extent and had been shuffled, but I did what I could during this time to preserve it and put things in the proper order.

And this is what got me set off towards the current path.
Because while there was plenty of things about the old art that I hated (the original "Hello" face panel among them), there were other things that to this day I think are drop dead gorgeous.

I managed to make amazing art back then. Circa September 2016--two and a half years ago, it'd appear.


I did intricate details that to this day I'm not sure I'd be able to do.

There are some things that are horrific and I'm honestly wondering if it's just that I rushed them because I struggle to understand how I could be so good in some areas and so bad in others. Or maybe I made them from memory without reference images and the amazing ones are ones where I cheated by using some, butstill. Doesn't matter. The point is. There's some gorgeous artwork in there.

So everything I just said about The Descended?

Applies to Red Hood Rider, even moreso in some instances.
My original plot is sort of lost. There might be a copy of it stored online (which I know where it is), but I'm not sure if that's a copy of the plot itself or if it's just most of the characters. (I know it's not fully up-to-date because the character of Brigand I'm pretty sure wasn't included among other stuff.)

The original plot I've mostly got memorized, but vast large swathes of it I have forgotten. Mostly stuff that gave characters other than Ruby...well, their characterization. Each of the ten fighting members of The Ruby Gang had immense characterization to them, and even the two non-fighting members of The Ruby Gang had plenty, and so too did support members like the Darkblood Coven's higher-up vampires, other Coven's vampire leaders, and such.

Every single Rogue got a lot of exposure, and even a wannabe Rogue got a repeat appearance. (That I remember, but stuff like that, I know I didn't.) Fighting styles, I had mapped out. Basic abilities, I knew. Details of the Rubyverse, largely mapped out and explored.

Lots of that stuff, I forgot.

The majority of it, I remember.

And just like The Descended?

Critically.

There's a "draw and discard"...
...Where I added key aspects I didn't have. Though to some extent I've re-forgotten them, when I was playing around with inventing my martial art, it was the vampiric martial art that I was inventing, for use in the Rubyverse for some of the choreographed fight scenes that were far lamer and more rigid prior to this invention.

And near the climax of the series, there was a whole Episode that I've invented...one which is one of the most important in the whole series, as it is the episode which explains why Ruby has been the protagonist the whole time, which explains Ruby's role in the Rubyverse, why she was selected to be The Chosen One. Before I had an episode covering a What If where she didn't exist, where Sally was The Chosen One, and it's still in the series at a much earlier point, but this new episode?

This new episode builds off of that rather than just leaving it, and ties things together that originally weren't.

Ruby is actually given a very strong reasoning for being the protagonist, and in it, the episode explores both why Ruby is me...and why Ruby isn't me. And how both halves of that are important to why she's the protagonist. And how everyone is a little bit me, and how they could get by without someone who is heavily me, but why in my story they had someone who is half me.

Because that's another thing which has changed about the story.

When I first envisioned Ruby.
She was born as a series of "what if"s rapidly chained together.
What If I were a magical girl.
What If I were a vampire.
What If I were both a magical girl and a vampire.

And from that, she became me in all but name, just with abilities I don't have. Me if I were a vampire magical girl.

...Except...

...She evolved.

She isn't me anymore.
She's still partially me. She's still got large aspects of me in her life, because she was based on me, she came from me.
But she became something else.

AND FURTHERMORE.

I became something else.
I diverged from Ruby, just as Ruby diverged from me.

Over the last couple of years, I have continued to have my world outlook expand and grow--and Ruby's outlook has also expanded and grown...but not identically to mine.

We've taken similar paths, but not identical ones...and this new episode just before the climax? It heavily explored this concept, this aspect, of her and why she earned her identity, her spot, as the protagonist, rather than having it just be given to her. A meta commentary on her role in the entire series, even.

So much about the series I've lost.

But in spite of her being largely out of focus.

Crucial details like that?

I didn't originally have...yet I have since been given.

A draw and discard.

Mostly memorized, some lost, but lots gained.

I wouldn't have it finished.
72 episodes were planned--each episode a little bit shorter, in the 20-40 page range rather than 30-40 page range, but with far more episodes you more than make up for that. Divided up into 12-episode seasons. Conservatively, that'd be 1440 pages; liberally, that'd be 2880 pages.

Red Hood Rider also updated at a rate of one page a week.
And was much, much newer.
When was the launch date, again? 
October 1st, 2016 it looks like.
Two and a half years ago.
At 52 pages per year, that's ballpark figure of ~130 pages.

Less than a tenth done with the series.
Heck.
Less than half way to conservatively being at the end of the first season.

But the other part I said about The Descended?
That part still applies.
I would have ~130 pages done for Red Hood Rider.
Instead of four.
FOUR.

Because I quit.
Because of real life stresses.
Because of stupidity.
Because of excuse after excuse.
Because I gave up.
Because I just...didn't do it.

And yet.
Now.

I want to.

I know how to do it, and do it better than I was doing it. I wouldn't need to redraw anything, all I'd do is suddenly have a years-long sudden improvement in the art. (Might come at the cost of it being in a different font tho as I don't remember what fonts I originally was using.)

I can make it amazing, make it stunning, I can fix my mistakes (for instance, fixing the godawful aesthetic of the ComicFury site), finish what I started, do everything I failed to do then and do it now. With my current skills, it's viable, it's doable, and it wasn't back then. It'd take time, it'd take planning, but I could make it work.

And I want to do it.

Even though I know it'll take time...and would take an amazing 28-56 years for me to finish if doing only one page a week. (Which is an outright impossible thing so I'd need to somehow manage to do more than one page a week. Like, two or three pages a week.)

Yet if I don't start it now.

It'll take that same amount of time whenever I do start it--and I'll be just as behind then, in the future, as I am now, because I didn't do it now, because I didn't close the gap any when I had the time, the chance, the method, the opportunity, to do so.

But in spite of that.

It's not the only thing I want to work on.
It plus The Descended are not the only thing I want to work on.

I really want to make Phyrra and Cyrus a reality.
I think of them almost every single day.
Again, there's a draw and discard effect going on.
Some worldbuilding details get lost; exact details of how episodes are meant to go get lost.
But the overarching chronology, what things happen when? I know by heart, and I keep on repeating them over and over again.

I really, really want to make them come to life.
They are my passion. There is an ambition there. It is a love project. A project of pure love, a creation filled to the brim with all my heart and soul, that I want to pour my everything into. I know it won't be easy. I've had a bit of an insider look into what constitutes a sound editor's job, and contrary to my original hopelessly naive belief that I might be able to do that myself realistically speaking having seen exactly what that entails I know that in theory I might be able to technically speaking do it...

...But that when doing so it's a butchered job that is a hot mess. In order for Phyrra and Cyrus to come to life as I envision it, I'd need someone else to do the sound editing for it. Because if it were me, I'd never be able to do it justice. I could do justice to The Descended. I could do justice to Red Hood Rider. (Although to get multiple pages out per week I may need to bite the bullet and get help because frankly I don't know how I'd manage so much as one a week yet alone multiple a week with no aid.)

I can't do justice to Phyrra and Cyrus. I can't do justice to Phyrra and Cyrus as a voice actor and even if I could do one voice I certainly couldn't do them all. I can't do justice to Phyrra and Cyrus as an animator least of all because I'd have to teach myself how to do it and then do the hot mess of a job at it which is shared for being what a sound editor would be.

I'd have to go back to my blog where I detailed everything about what I need for Phyrra and Cyrus to confirm this is everything, but off the top of my head, what I need?
-Animator for the four openings
-Animator for the four closings
-Animator for the show itself (the three need not be the same, though they can be)
-1-4 composers for the openings' music (one composer could do all four, four composers could do one, or anywhere in-between those extremes)
-1-4 composers for the closings' music (ditto)
-I'll handle the songwriting for the openings and closings
-1-4+ singers for the openings (probably at least one will use multiple voices and thus need multiple people)
-1-4+ singers for the closings (ditto)
-A sound editor
-Voice actors for each member of the Thaukama, each villain, recurring characters (rare as they may be), and one-off characters (this probably is 2-4 dozen people altogether depending on how much overlap there is)
-I'll handle the scriptwriting

I can do justice to the things I say I'll handle.
I can, and plan to, give direction to the animators for openings, for closings, for the show itself. (The latter is an extension of the script; of course the script, or what I call the script, covers the basic plan of what's to be animated.) But I can't do animation and have it do Phyrra and Cyrus justice.
I can songwrite and do Phyrra and Cyrus justice.
I can't sing and have it do Phyrra and Cyrus due justice.
I can give direction to the composers for what I'm looking for from them, but my skills in musical composition are lackluster enough that I wouldn't be able to properly do Phyrra and Cyrus justice if I handled this.
Having seen what sound editing entails, how involved the process is, how so much of a single second of video animation can have like thirty individual sounds (not an exaggeration, if anything that's understating it rather than overstating it) attached to it? I can't do that and do Phyrra and Cyrus justice. I'd miss too much, I'd leave too much out, it'd be too basic, too sloppy, to chaotic, to filled with things it shouldn't be and missing things it should have.
I can't voice act and even if I could I can't voice act for the number of people I need.

I can't get these things for free, I know this, too. Even an animator working cheaply for the exposure it'd give, even an animator who I could get on board for recognizing it as a love project, even an animator who could get as passionate about it as I am...well...even if I could get someone with one, two, or even all three of those traits?

It still wouldn't be free to do. Because anyone who learns animation to the level of skill I would be looking for is doing this sort of thing professionally--as in. They need to pay their bills. And animation takes time. Ain't an animator in the world who'd be able to provide that animesque high quality animation I am looking for, who'd do it in what amounts to their spare free time, because that's what them doing it for free would be.

If they do it for a cost, then because it's a job they are going to be making it a project they put some fairly decent investment into. Maybe it's not their top priority project, but they're not going to put it on the backburner, they're not going to put it off. They're getting paid, so they are going to make it and make it well because they want to live off of their animations.

If they did it for free, then they'd still need to pay their bills. They need money for food, for gas, for electricity, for supplies, for internet, for all the stuff professional artists and animators need. They need money to survive--so they need to get it from somewhere.

If I wasn't that somewhere, then they'd need to be doing something else to get the money...meaning that Phyrra and Cyrus? Not their focus. Honestly...if Phyrra and Cyrus took longer to make because the animator was working cheaply and had it as a lower-tier project while working on a higher-tier project that was more expensive and can sustain them, that'd be fine.

My concern though is with the quality; when I do finally find an animator...if it doesn't live up to my vision...if it isn't what I envisioned or even better (because the thing about good artists to a writer is that sometimes, they exceed the writer's expectations and throw in details that are even better than what the writer told them to do, and I imagine animation is similar in that it can be better than what the script called for), if it looks like junk because as far as the animator was concerned something not helping them pay the bills was junk to make at a lower quality...what was the point in making it at all?

I imagine that with the proper research, I could probably find someone who would work for free. Would be incredibly hard to find, but I could find it out there somewhere. But would they make it quality? That's what I'm looking for. And 48 episodes of quality? That's not cheap. That's not free. That's expensive.

It takes money that I don't have.

But I want to make it.
I know I can do it.
Realistically speaking I'd be funding it by season, I'd be needing to do a fundraiser, I'd need to find a way to make ad revenue to go towards the future seasons and maybe fundraise them if the ad revenue isn't enough, and even after doing that I'm going to have to find people who have a combination of those traits.

Who are willing to do it cheaper than the usual rate for the sake of exposure.
And/or who are willing to do it cheaper than the usual rate because they recognize that it is a labor of love, a project with heart and soul behind it that they genuinely believe in.
And/or who are passionate about the vision that they are able to see I have for it.

Because that's the only way I'll be able to get the money raised and have the money raised cover everything.
I know a lot of research needs to be done on my end.
I know that a lot of work needs to be done on my end.
Finishing the scripts.
Doing the storyboarding of sorts.
Filling in filler details.
That sort of stuff.
I know that all.

But I want​ to do it.

And I also want to be a teacher. Not as much as I want to make Phyrra and Cyrus, and, heck, not as much as I want to create my webcomics. But.
I love teaching. I love imparting my insights, my wisdom, my thoughts, my teachings, onto others. I like to be able to say that a person was left in a better position, because of a contribution I gave to their growth.

I just have a love of teaching.
I don't even care if my lessons are listened to, if the people I am teaching to actually learn, though obviously I take pride and joy when they do, especially if they are able to take my teaching and improve on it to make it better than what I was teaching them to do.

I just...really like passing my knowledge and skills on to a "younger" generation. 

This need not be a teaching job proper, though.
I don't need to be a Teacher to be a teacher.

For instance, I am prominently known for being an expert/"expert" at the theory behind mafia. (Depends on who you ask. Bit of both camps are accurate; I have been playing for ten years so it figures that yes there are somethings I really can teach people about and being autistic with my brain wired in nonstandard ways gives me unique insights others over those ten years have missed...but because I am autistic I am prone to poor explanations of concepts, and just because I've done it for so long doesn't mean I'm perfect or know everything or am right all the time because I'm human prone to error and also poor judgments. Could ramble on this subject all day, but here's not the place for it.)

Nothing gives me greater joy than just getting a chance to tell people about my philosophies and have my ideas be passed on to them--not necessary verbatim. Taking elements of my ideas is actually a way to turn a basic idea which was on the right track but never nailed it (which is what I often am) to be refined to the point of actually getting it.

I encourage healthy skepticism in my teachings, will tell things as I see them and have a bit of a "that's the way it is" attitude towards some stuff, but I like just...seeing people actually read what I say, and taking even some of it to heart. Like, pondering what I said, considering it, and even just going, "ehh I disagree, for these reasons".

Someone who reads my ideas, and develops their own, someone who listens to my teachings, but develops their own. Someone who paid attention and took the best of what I had to say and eliminated the worst of what I had to offer. I love having stuff like that happen.

And another form teaching can take?

The main form which I dream about it taking, in fact?
The ultimate form--parenting.
Now, granted.
I know that I'll probably be a lousy mom.
Doesn't change that I want to BE a mom.

Doesn't have to be biological children, though it could be. I'm not picky. Doesn't have to be from birth babies, though it could be; again I'm not picky. I'd consider myself no less the mother of a 4 year old than I would an infant, no less the mother of a child with my blood in them and/or my girlfriend's blood in them than I would someone who has none.

Aside from being a housewife being my dream job (again, even though I know I'd be terrible at it and it is pragmatically speaking, economically nonviable in this day and age), frankly, the main reason I think I've always dreamed of raising children?

Was so that I could teach those children.

Every time I think about it.
Every time I think about all the times I've pondered wanting kids.
Every time I think about having envisioned raised kids.
Every time I think about all the different ways it could have happened.

Ultimately.

The thing that I remember most from all of those times.

Was that I was teaching them the lessons that a mother teaches their children, more or less the type of lessons my mom taught me only being my own unique take on them, stuff like actions versus consequences, the price of pursuing what you want, the like. Giving them a drive, giving them an encouragement (because encouragement is one of the most important aspects of teaching).

Supporting them, loving them.

It's mostly that I wanted to teach them to be the human beings they end up being--and with luck, to have some pride in knowing that their lives turned out the way they did in part because of what I helped them with. (We'd certainly hope so, because the alternative to that is despair/shame/horror that their lives turned out the way they did and the constant doubt of where I went wrong. Stuff like, 'they became a serial killer', noooooooot something I'd exactly be able to find pride/joy in, is what I mean.)

Ultimately, though...everything I just said?

Literally everything--mafia, the civ 3 mod, the descended, red hood rider, being a teacher, raising a family? I'd give it all up for my girlfriend. I'd give it all up to just live my life with my girlfriend. It is perhaps one of my greatest wants. It is one of the holy trifecta, the other two being the other two I listed.

I want to transition.

I want to have a full, happy, rich life.

I happen to also legitimately think that these three things are the only three on the entire list which augment each other rather than get in the way of each other. I have a finite amount of time in a day.
I can't, fundamentally can't, every day.
Do mafia.
Do the civ 3 mod.
Do The Descended.
Do Red Hood Rider.
Do Phyrra and Cyrus.
Teach.
And everything else.

I can't do them all at once.
I have to pick and choose. (More on that in a bit.)

But I legitimately, genuinely, think that the holy trifecta are together things that not only I can do all at once, but which are borderline impossible to do without having done all at once.

​I am a girl.
Without having fully transitioned, I will never truly be able to be at peace--which will diminish my happiness.

I derive the greatest happiness and joy out of the love I have for my girlfriend. They are the most important thing in the world to me--more important than anything else and I would do anything for them.

Transitioning is something that I legitimately don't think I can build a support network for on my own--it's a little bit of a self-feeding loop. To build a support network, I need a support network. And to get a support network, I need a support network. I honestly don't think that I'll be able to manage it on my own. And while I can theoretically have access to a support network here...realistically speaking, I don't see how it ever works smoothly.

It'd be bumpy, shaky, at best. It's something that I'd barely manage to do, if I managed to do it at all. There's a very real chance that left to my own devices, I never transition in spite of always wanting to, for like...ten, twenty years. However long it takes my dad to die. And even then, only transitioning if I am not then reliant on my brother, and can find a way to manage it in the hectic situation.

It's something that in theory I can do, but pragmatically speaking, transitioning is something that I'd likely have the easiest time with if it was with my girlfriend. 

And of course--my girlfriend probably wouldn't have become my girlfriend if I hadn't known I was a transwoman, and presumably is happier when knowing that I am happy (especially if they are the cause of said happiness).

When I wrote this blog, originally on the 23rd, I titled it "I don't know what I want to do".
But it's more like...
...I don't know what to focus on doing.
I know what I want to do.

I just spend five and a half hours typing it out. (Okay that's a slight exaggeration. Started at just past 12:45, and it's 6:03 now, so it's more like 5.75 hours.)

Everything I wrote? That's what I want to do. (Mind you I didn't cover large swathes of some subjects, e.g. the massive chunks of the December blog I left out.)
It's just that they are all so...so...conflicting, and I just.
Have a paralysis on what to focus on, more or less.

The hunt proceeded about the way I'd expect it to--every year, we say we need to make it easier (especially on me and my brother). Every year, in spite of insisting that has been done, it proves to not be the case. This year, my older sister swore she made it easy, yet almost every single hiding spot was of a difficulty rating I'd associate with being a hiding spot for my younger sister--the one who she's allowed to be mean to with hiding.

At least three of my eggs were duck taped to surfaces.
At least twice, I ran into the problem of having correctly identified where the egg was, searched for it, and not having found it, and thus making the obvious conclusion; I searched it, it wasn't there, so it wasn't hidden there--except it was.

Suffice to say.
Once. again.

I finished last.

I didn't find a single egg on my own.

Not. one.

Not a single egg, I could locate without a hint.

Normally?

Normally, people can find 2-4 eggs on their own.

Not. one. Could I find without basically being told the answer.
Because the answers were absolute bs hiding spots--hard enough that my younger sister would have trouble with a fair number of them.

My younger sister, the one who my older sister will pull evil stunts like hiding an egg inside of the refrigerator light (okay so that was my younger sister hiding my older sister's egg, butstill), who hid an egg inside of an empty orange juice container, who's hidden eggs inside of salt shakers, from light fixtures, inside the garbage can (with protection), the list goes on and on.

Evil spots like that.

She gave to me.

Suffice to say.

I was not amused.

I have specifically told her.
Time and time again.
Easier.
Easier.
Make it easier.

So I don't always finish dead last.

Yet each year.

Instead of easier.

It's getting harder.

In spite of her saying she made it easier.

She's not telling a deliberate lie, but she's absolutely lying to herself if she thinks that the spots she gave me this year were in any way easy.

The easiest thing to find was my basket, and that's mostly because baskets come in only two hiding varieties: nigh-impossible, or ridiculously easy; last year (or was it two years ago?), she learned that the nigh-impossible way simply wasn't something I'd handle well.

Yes, I am incredibly bitter, why do you ask?
It's not the dead last bit, honestly. It's that there's the sheer level of dissonance between what she said and what she gave me. She said it was easier; what she gave me was something which, egg after egg. I kept saying. "This isn't an egg for my difficulty level!" It was hard enough last year, but this year was ten times harder. 

If you keep on.
Time and time again.
Finishing last.
And time and time again.
You say.
"It needs to be easier."
And you are told.
It is.
Only to find it harder.

You'd be pretty miffed, too!

That I have, so consistently, finished last is a testament to how unskilled I am--yet she consistently is treating me like I should be getting better, rather than worse, and I am getting exactly that. This egg hunt, I wasn't functioning brain-wise for the first half of it. That wasn't what made it hard, though. I knew that even functioning at 100%, I'd never have found those eggs on my own, because they are simply not eggs that are my level; they are things way too hard for me to find in the best of conditions.

Me NOT in the best of conditions, though, made the impossible task just...laughable. Like. Pathetic. I am just entirely frustrated by the whole thing, because the hunt is meant to be equal parts fun and challenging--yet with each. and every. single. passing. failure. There's no fun. There's no thrill. There's no reward.

There's no exhilaration in being hand-fed the answers--which was what every single egg was.
There's no exhilaration from finishing last every single year.
There's no reward in. consistently. failing. Because in spite of saying it needs to be easier. It never actually getting easier.

My younger sister, hiding for my brother? She knows how to succeed at making it easier. My brother found some eggs on his own, without help, and none of the eggs he had were at sister-level difficulty. I saw all of them and went, "yep. For us two, that's an appropriate level difficulty for an egg".

She nailed it.

She did what needed to be done for him.

My sisters hiding each others' eggs are deliberately as evil as humanly possible--that's fine for them, because knowing each other as they do, they can usually find most of their eggs without hints because they simply are that good.

But when my sister hides my eggs at that difficulty level.
Instead of the difficulty level appropriate for me.
Instead of the difficulty level which my brother's eggs were at.

It's not fun.
It's a joke.
A bad one.

It's just...

...How could she just.
Be that blind.
To what I am actually able to do?

I literally can't do it at that level.
How could she think what she gave me was at the level my brother's eggs were at.
When the level my brother's eggs were at--the level which my eggs should have been at--was leagues easier than what I actually got?

It turns what should be a fun even into just a pile of pure frustration.
Losing when I feel I legitimately deserved to lose is one thing. If my eggs were hidden in places akin to the places my brother's eggs were hidden, I'd deserve to have lost and there'd be no bitter feelings. Disappointment, sure, yeah, but not bitterness because I'd know that I lost because of stupidity.

Losing because I could never have ever possibly won?
Because the difficulty level was not something appropriate for me?

It's just...why. It's not like I didn't stress it enough. Easier; I said to make it easier. I emphasized that I had lost last time, I emphasized that it took me longest to find mine last time, I said that I needed it to be particularly easy in comparison. Quite explicitly. Clear as could be. E a s i e r.

...Instead? I got eggs that were hidden in fairly creative spots, most never-before-used, never-before-checked; the times they had been used/checked, it wasn't meant for me and I wasn't acutely aware of most of them. And the two eggs which I believe were repeats of mine in previous years? As mentioned, I searched the spots, and when I didn't find an egg after searching them wrote them off because of course when you search thoroughly a spot and find nothing you're going to assume the spot wasn't used.

It's one thing to just casually search through an area and not find it--we miss eggs doing that all the time, par for the course. It's another thing to literally be running your fingers through where the egg is and not feel it and not see it and with the texture feeling like there's no egg there and the visualization feeling like there's no egg there, concluding that there is no egg there...except there was.

I am just...not impressed. There's a difference between making it challenging, and making it impossible-without-handholding-help. Challenging for me is still simple stuff. Challenging for me is still cliched stuff which has been done before. In casual searches I am prone to missing things. It doesn't take much to fool me, but I can usually realize, "oh I didn't look here well", go back, and if there's an egg there, find it. Because I knew I hadn't searched it as well as I should, and going back, give it the proper attention it needs to find it.

Simple stuff--but still enough to give it a hunt.

When I miss an egg because I did look there well, when I did look thoroughly, or when I miss an egg because I've just given up on it on the sheer inability of me to have so much as a clue as to where it could possibly be because there's just nowhere left I could so much as fathom.

That's not difficult.
That's not challenging.

That's just sheer cruelty. And as I said--my sisters can be evil to each other as much as they want to be, but they're not supposed to be that way to the other two, me and my brother, when hiding ours.

...Yet that is exactly what I got put through.

After having had a thoroughly miserable time last year, for much the same reason.
And maybe the year before that, too.

She's not learning the lesson, and the only lesson I'm learning is that I'm a worthless piece of junk.

This is just.

The polar opposite of what our egg hunt is supposed to instill.

It's supposed to be entertainment.
It's supposed to be uplifting.
But every year.
I am just...increasingly more and more dejected.
Because all I am getting.
​Is how trash I am.

And it's so persistent, I might as well link it to you!

To be a little more specific, it's the area just after the one-minute mark that I'm looping through, because there's a nice little not-actually-repeating-but-close-enough-to-trick-my-brain bit. (Not sure how to explain that better. Basically, different words are used and you can tell they're different words, but they're sung using the same notes--and especially when it's not English and especially without the lyrics showing on the opener, that's enough to trick the brain into looping that segment over and over again.)

So while we're here.

Might as well talk about it some more.

One--that song is drop-dead amazing. It is a stunning thing on its own.
But two--the animation accompanying it is perfect.

It is one of the, if not the, best openers for an anime I've ever seen. It is just. that. good.

So it figures if my praises are that high for the opener, they are equally sung for the show proper.

And that rings true.
As my girlfriend put it, I gave the show my highest possible form of praise:
"The premise is really, really similar to the book I was working on". (Specifically the book before Heroes of Gistou.)
That book featured characters who, as early as their childhood years, plotted to escape a complex ruled by non-human entities. The characters had to show incredible intelligence and wisdom beyond their years in order to orchestrate the escape. (Granted, this happened in the prologue...and all but one of them was killed because while the escape succeeded, afterwards, in the chase, they died. So the similarities pretty much end there, butstill.)

Given how much I pride myself in my writing.

That's about as high a praise as is possible, in fact.

And there's another thing I would like to point out, from a different story of mine--one not intended to be a book.

Emma (and for that matter Ray and whatshisname), The Promised Neverland's protagonist. Is 11 years old...
...The same age as Phyrra and Cyrus.

...Why is that significant?

...Because this show is more or less a validation of "I'm on target" for displaying smart, intelligent, wise, mature 11-year-olds in terms of content. Yes, they are occasionally still kids, but the show displays them actually being smart. Not fake-smart. Genuinely clever and intuitive, prodigies who are geniuses, with ingenuity and quite capable of coming up with amazing strategies.

Which is what Phyrra and Cyrus are supposed to be.

It gets better.

Emma and Phyrra are pretty similar personality-wise. Cheerful, fairly friendly and somewhat polite while being somewhat blunt. (Admittedly, bluntness is more Ray's trait and politeness more whatshisname's trait.) A bit of a doofus compared to the other kid(s) her age, but in spite of needing things explained to her sometimes, by no means actually an idiot, capable of extreme cleverness of her own...while having a charming smile, warm heart, charismatic attitude and surprising level of insight.

Which is more or less what I'm aiming for with Phyrra.

And Cyrus is similarly like whatshisname with a side of Ray, being level-headed, calm, cool, collected, a planner, pragmatic, efficient, cold, yet still understanding and not all-knowing. Someone who prefers thinking rather than athletic flairs, and is lethally calculating in maneuvers.

...But it gets even better.

When Phyrra's body-swapped into Cyrus, and vice-versa. (The state that they stay in most of the series, aside from the twice-a-month times they are in their own bodies past the prologue.)
Because Cyrus's real body looks a lot like Emma, and Phyrra's real body looks somewhat like a cross between Ray and whatshisname.

When body-swapped.

Phyrra actually looks a lot like Emma.
And Cyrus actually looks a lot like a cross between Ray and whatshisname.

(My girlfriend's probably gonna be ticked when reading this blog and realizing I already forgot his name. Or more specifically, I'm not positive of it. I kinda have 'Nolan' in my head as being it but I'm not sure that was it?)

If you took Ray's hairstyle/length and the expressions/eyes/hair color/etc. of whatshisname, then it'd look pretty darn close to what Phyrra's real body is like, the body Cyrus is trapped in most of the time.

And Cyrus's real body, which Phyrra is trapped in most of the time, being a body that I deliberately modeled to be a stereotypical shonen anime protagonist body.
...Is pretty darn similar to Emma's, because she is a bit of a stereotypical shonen anime protagonist even in her body.

Obviously, they're not basically-identical, but the resemblance is fairly self-evident.
I haven't really drawn Phyrra and Cyrus yet (I should, I know, but I haven't), but I've made reference images of them using various programs, some of which are on this blog. As a refresher, here's a dump of them all.

Keep in mind, none of these are their official look. Keep in mind, all of these were made in various programs. The first faces were made in an iteration of a program called FaceMaker (specifically this one, which the maker themselves note is not too original as there are others like it, but that's the one I used for the images shown), the most-of-body, in-profile ones are from this anime character maker, the next set which are probably some of the closest-to-vision versions are from the continuously-expanding-with-new-content rinmaru games anime character creator, the next set of generic faces is from anime face maker 2, and the full-body picture is from a can-optionally-become-NSFW, tread-carefully, you-have-been-warned, K-ON dressup 2.

I can't stress enough how none of these are official.
None of these fully capture the aesthetic.
These are mostly done as brainstorming. Proof-of-concept work. Throwing ideas around for exact iterations of what their outfits look like. I have, in previous blog entries, described their exact look, and these give you a fairly good idea of what sort of look that is, but none of them are exact. You can't even average them all out to get it, either, because some are truer to the vision than others.

These are all just loose references, unofficial things that I use as a shorthand, lazy reference, things I use because I lack any other way currently to give a visualization of the two--until I actually draw Phyrra and Cyrus myself, I don't have any non-text picture of them. I can describe them, but without using these program screencaps, I can't actually show them to you yet because they haven't been drawn yet.

Butstill.
From this, you can probably get where I am coming from with what I am saying. Take a look at this in comparison since while not the best picture of the characters it's enough.

Cyrus's hair is more red than orange and his eyes are matched to the hair pretty much (not exactly, his eyes are more like the color of Emma's hair whereas his hair is redder than Emma's hair), and when Phyrra inhabits his body as she does for most of the show, she has the general aesthetic shown here by Emma. This shot shows a lot about Emma's personality and it is one perfect for Phyrra as well, showing expressions, showing thoughts, and so on and so forth.

Phyrra's hair is styled almost like Ray's, except removing the emo-covers-one-eye part of it. Pull that hair back so both eyes are visible, and suddenly you have her hair there, albeit hanging back down to the shoulders in the back. Blue instead of black, but you can get the idea.

Her eyes are almost exactly the color of whats-his-name's eyes over there.

And Cyrus, when inhabiting her body as he does for most of the show. Has an expression which is dead-inbetween Ray's and whats-his-name's. Not quite as cynical/serious as Ray, but also not quite as "open" as whats-his-name's. Deadpan, somewhat-serious, but not looking aggressive/dark as much as Ray does here.

So in a sense.

This is me paying the highest of high compliments to the show.

Comparing it to a novel I love and hold dear is high enough praise in of itself.

Egotistical to the extreme, sure, albeit not entirely unjustifiably so. (The novel I can trace its exact origins down to the short story which is still posted online. If I recall correctly, to about 2009ish, give or take a year. Turning it into a novel, I can also track down the exact year of, which I believe but am not sure was 2011. I am pretty sure that whenever the manga this anime is adapting was made, didn't start until after that, so my work comes first, even if it ends up published later. Which I realize doesn't change much, but is why I say not entirely unjustified...just mostly unjustified.)

But hey, I am egotistical so when an extreme narcissist like me says, "this work is like one of my own!", it is as high a praise as is possible because given how high I hold my work to be, the esteem in it, saying it's as good as that is saying it is really good.

...Yet I'm not just comparing it to the novel I love and hold dear.

I am comparing it to my pet project that I hold the highest of high ambitions for.

To the point where I even mentioned it in passing to my mom today, which is a way of kinda sorta solidifying it as "real".

When I mention something online, it can stay online forever and never have a form of "legitimacy" to it.
That doesn't mean that things online for me are illegitimate. But what it does mean is that things online are harder to have be legitimate.

And to say words in real life holds power.
Hearing Bree online is nice; hearing it in person is something which is life-changing.
That's the effect I am talking about, and I think this is something anyone online can understand what I'm getting at here. How what's done and said in real life means magnitudes more, and why it is a goal so much to strive for--because it is so worth it when it is actually done. It feels like the difference between saying and doing (real life), the difference between living it (real life) and not-really-not-living-it-but-not-really-fully-living-it.

I think you get what I mean.

Saying, even as a hint.
That Phyrra and Cyrus as a project exists.

Just had a way of solidifying it.
As.
Not just "this is something I want to do, but...".
But.
As.
"Yeah I'm doing this".

Phyrra and Cyrus, that project of mine that I hold the highest of high ambitions for, the thing where I solidified it as being real.

I am comparing to the show.

That show does basically everything I'd want to do in Phyrra and Cyrus.

So when I say "The Promised Neverland is the quality to which I strive to make Phyrra and Cyrus be".
There really can't be any higher praise than that.
​It's higher than the highest of the high praises.

Getting a bit late, so let's get the blog in for today, since I need one for today rather than relying on the one from yesterday that just so happened to be past midnight. Let's start with the Civ 3 mod work. Right now, I'm documenting the various technologies, and specifically documenting what things are assigned to what techs.

It is slow, meticulous work, especially since in many cases, I don't actually know. But things are coming together, slowly but surely. Mind you. This work is just a prelude. I'm working out what is assigned to what tech, mostly so that I can make sure techs have the correct chronology and to see if there's any unnecessary techs that can be cut out to reduce on the clutter.

Right now, I have 9 wonders not assigned to techs (all middle ages ones, want to get that scenario to get them best placed), pretty much most small wonders not assigned to techs (I need to check on them to see if they even are assigned to techs; most I think are not), and 36 buildings not assigned to techs (mostly, government ones/made up ones and medieval ones).

Who the heck knows how many units I don't have assigned, but quite a number. Still, though, if I can actually nail down the exact contents and chronology of techs, then I'll be able to figure something out.
My goal here is more or less to see what techs are prerequisites for other techs, as well as to make sure both unit and building progressions continue correctly, as well as to appropriately time buildings/wonders as much as possible. (Given that wonders will be souped up to include "puts building in every city" for pretty much most.)

Documentation is, again, documentation rather than work, but all things considered, this is progressing amazingly quickly. Like, I was not expecting to be doing as well as I am with the tech tree; I was expecting it to be an absolute, complete and total nightmare, and while trimming the tech tree down so that it's any semblance of functional will be difficult, it's not altogether impossible thanks to what I'm doing now.

Also, ultimately, the tech tree doesn't need to be aesthetically pleasing. It can break the boundaries of the science window...so long as it is still functional when doing so. Techs overlapping by a pixel or two, techs with a pixel or two off the edge of the screen, techs with coordinates placing them in slightly obstructive spots, etc.

(Speaking of techs, I need to figure out how to get the science adviser to have commentary on each of them, another thing for the to-do list.)

As long as it can be figured out reasonably intuitively, that's all that matters. Since the arrowheads between techs were never going to be lined up anyway (that requires some sort of messing around in some sort of specialized program or something of that sort, the simple version of it is that it can't be done in just paint--the only program coming with the computer--so as far as I'm concerned that equates to not being able to do it at all), it was always going to be something which people would need to figure out on their own.

And I'm fairly certain the logical progression I have makes sense. At least it does to someone who's played both the vanilla game and all the scenarios, with an idea of what sort of things to expect.

With that out of the way.

It's early enough that I can talk about the idea I wanted to yesterday.

It's a superhero setting I'm dubbing with a working title of the Quadraverse, a superhero setting heavily inspired by the world of parahumans, the setting of Worm. (Three of the four main characters were more or less built with the idea of, "what could I do to make a fairly realistic cape for that setting?", with the fourth technically also fitting but having been created after I knew it'd be a different one.)

I'm not going to bother looking up if the name "quadraverse" is taken, because this is a story idea that I won't ever actually make. Given I won't actually make it, doesn't really matter if the name's taken; I'd have to change it if it were taken, sure, but since I'm not going to make it, not worth looking up to see if I need to.

Because all good superhero settings need a slang name for supes, this one uses the term "Duals". This name has three layers to it. The first is the obvious; duals have a dual identity, a civilian life and a life of crime, heroics, or whatnot. The second is in acknowledgement that no power has inherently one use. A stereotypically good power can be used by the worst of villains; a stereotypically evil power can be used by the most heroic of people; all powers thus have equal potential for good and evil.

But the true and final meaning of it: every human has a soul...but duals have a second soul, from which their power draws from. This second soul is what allows them to control their power; its link to the first soul, but separation from it, acts as a conduit, a control circuit. It allows people to not always have their power on, it allows people to have passive powers, it allows people to access their power and have an innate, inherent, instinctive control over it, safely, without the risk of being hurt by their own ability.

The story I invented revolves around the formation of the fourth iteration of a group, Heroes 4 Hire, which as the name suggests, has four members that are heroes, who perform heroics for a price...sort-of. Across all iterations of the group, they have held a common mandate in how they operate; they are genuinely heroic and altruistic, but also pragmatic and recognize that they're human and thus, can't always help everyone.

Basically, they operate as a group with a separation from any governing entity; they are independent from the government, albeit having a partnership with them. The main reason for this is for personal freedom; no bosses, no rules, no regulations, no need for PR, no need to obey commands, no need to do things they don't want to, no need to follow things by-the-book at the cost of doing the right thing, no need to be burdened by the law, no need to be under control of people who don't know how the world works, no need to be influenced by corrupt politics, no need to be bossed around by people whose motives are disconnected from heroics.

Heroics done the way they want heroics to be done...and done when they want to. Flexible rather than rigid schedules. The right to choose not to save people, the ability to decline without consequence, simply because they are not obligated to accept a job. They can take breaks, they can rest, they can do things at times other heroes are indisposed, they can do things other heroes can't.

And yet--while they do aim for personal gain, they can take jobs for free, if they want to. Doing good on the street just for the sake of doing good, not because they were ordered to. Just because doing good was the right thing to do. Yet they reserve that right to take jobs for personal gain, to earn money, to make a profit, to actually make significant money off of their efforts.

The group isn't quite full-time, but is so dedicated to it that they basically are anyway; the things they do outside of their hero work are mostly passions/hobbies of theirs. (Even if said passions/hobbies involve a profession where they can make money.) Heroics is their life's work, their job, and as a proper job, they need to get paid enough in wages to at least make do, but preferably live a little luxuriously.

The group has received flak for this, the group has had trouble because of this, the governments partnered with them receive criticism for allowing a group with no oversight to effectively act with the same authority as groups with oversight, but they live care-free enough to not be that concerned about it.

The first iteration of Heroes 4 Hire had the following members (mind you, these weren't the ones who I got the inspiration for the setting from; that's the current iteration):
Spear-It, the team leader, had (well, has, he's retired but still alive) an ability to summon a "spirit" form. Said spirit form would function almost entirely the same way a normal human would; he could see through their eyes, smell through nose, hear through ears, etc. He could do this without distraction, able to fully control his own body naturally and his spirit form separately. Said spirit form was entirely invisible, not so much as a single piece of evidence it existed, and utterly intangible in all regards (aside from his ability to sense via touch through it).

There was no visible link between him and his spirit. There was also no known range to his spirit. The spirit could function even when he was unconscious. The spear part comes in the form of the spirit form being able to summon an unlimited supply of phantom spears, which were the only part of the spirit able to affect the physical world...and could do so tremendously effectively, puncturing through just about anything with ease.

He was the big guns of the team, handling most of their offense.

...After he announced his name to be Spear-it, the rest of the team (originally planning to let him name them) wisely decided that they'd pick their own names and not leave it to him as originally intended.

Ribcage, who shared the second-in-command position on the team, was (well, still is) a tecchie (read: tinker; this setting's slang for technology-based heroes) who specialized in creating bars, usually used for entrapment. (Spear-it's proposed name for him was Bar-ier.) He handled containment and served as the team's defense.

Chain Link, the other second-in-command of the team, was a person with the power to see how all things are connected to one another. (This is a power which you see used on occasion quite effectively.) This basically made him an invincible combatant, able to perfectly chain things to have the exact desired outcome he wanted, but in spite of his combat potential, he usually acted as, in tandem with Ribcage, the team smarts, coordinating their efforts to maximize their effect.

He retired at the same time the rest of his team did, but came out of retirement to fight in the event that would later become known as the Fall of London, and like most heroes who fought there, died in the wake of the disaster. However, he'd later be revived by the antagonist Horseman. (See below for more details there.)

Spear-it's proposed name for him was Ball-swing (off of the idea of a newton's cradle).

Port, the final member of the team, had (well, has) the ability to shoot from his fingers, stretching out as far as he wants, portals to wherever he thinks of. Since he can open as many portals as he has fingers, and these portals need not be directly in front of the fingers (the portals, oval-like, are connected to his fingers with an energy-string; this string can be all bendy, like this ~, to vary their exact location).

Since they could extend as far as he wanted them to, and could be to anywhere he wanted them to, and each portal was as large as he wanted them to be (within reason; the minimum size was that of a finger and the maximum size about twice the size/width of a person), and he wasn't limited to just one, he was quite effective as a method of transporation, especially since as long as he kept the portals open, they were two-way.

Spear-it's proposed name for him was Fingerport.

Eventually, the first generation of Heroes 4 Hire decided to pass the torch on to the next generation, giving their blessing for a group of young upstart kids looking to get into the heroics business to make use of it, as long as they strived towards the same goals as they had.

This group was comprised of the following:
Streamline, the leader of the group, was a genius tecchie, whose work pretty much allowed for the existence of other tecchies (Ribcage included!). As a young kid, he make three pivotal breakthroughs, paving the way for the inventions tecchies would make use of: the Graviton Manipulator Field (allowing for easy flight), the Light Loop (a way to make a continuous loop of pure light), and the Space Compactor (a way to have things unfold from a compact form).

To the modern day, as a tecchie, he is world famous for said breakthroughs, and is well-known as the creator of ten technologies making use of these inventions:
The Lancenet (a compact weapon which extends out a long distance, with the aim to capture and control), LightBlade (basically a lightsaber), LightClaws (a blade below the shoulder, essentially, mounted on the hands from the wrist below, acting both as a personal shield/defense system and as a powerful hacking weapon at close range), Ringboard (a hoverboard that's ring-shaped), Spearboard (same basic design, only unfolded to not be a ring), Triboard (basically combining the benefits of the spearboard and ringboard), Wheelboard (basically a souped-up, compact, motorcycle; you grab onto the handle, and two gigantic wheels unfold from it that you can then steer; a bubble encases you and you move at a maximum speed of ~400 mph, which doubles up as, when in its compact form, a really effective staff weapon), Medboard (a better stretcher/backboard that can also serve as a restraint, with a built-in system capable of both analyzing the person strapped in and putting them in stasis if need be, useful not only for saving people but containing criminals for transporation), Stun Cannonboard (a stun gun with a wide beam that has no recoil and can travel in the air), and Stun Gunboard (aside from the Wheelboard, the only 'board' not capable of being airborne, a gun version of the stun cannonboard which comes equipped with various tools, like scans, scopes, etc.).

To this day, the group is able to function from the profits of the patents he got on them. Many of those things are in high demand, in both the private sector and the government. Medboards, stun gunboards, and wheelboards most famously, for their sheer versatility as tools.

He was the older brother of Webster.
In spite of being world-famous for his breakthroughs and his inventions, his career as an actual hero is relatively obscure.

Timewarp, similarly to Ribcage, held status as being shared second-in-command. His power was to shift people forward or backward in time--they'd stay in the same spot, but they'd be in a different time. If he sent people forward in time, they would disappear in the interim time altogether. If he sent people backwards in time, their past self would vanish from existence. As a result, he could only send people backwards in time a maximum of 24 hours, but forward in time as much as he'd like.

He mostly used his power as a form of recon, as well as a way of controlling the environment; his ability wasn't limited to just people, and could be anything. Good at search and rescue. If a person was dead or in too bad of shape, simply shift someone back in time to a spot where they'd be able to help avert the disaster in the first place.

Gridlock, the other second-in-command, had the power of creating geometrically-based constructs out of something not quite hard light but not quite pure energy, in-between. Think forcefields, made out of methodical mathematical precision, except not limited to just forcefields; he could make lines, he could make spheres, he could make anything he could think of, so long as it followed a basic abstract form/shape. So no meticulously creating, sayyyy, a car, or the types of things you'd see a green lantern make. 

Making a grid was his signature move, thus his name, one which was utterly unbreakable.

Webster, the younger brother of Streamline, is the only member to be in all three iterations except for the first, and thus, I'll be discussing his power when I talk about the rest of his current team. However, I'll say that at the time, he was the rookie of the team, the youngest member.

As a whole, the second iteration of Heroes 4 Hire were a group of close-knit friends. The first iteration were loose associates, who over the course of their career bonded; the second iteration were bonded before their career in heroics started. They started as soon as they were legally old enough to begin (which was years after Streamline had made his breakthroughs, although he hadn't made all his inventions at that time), and not long after earned the respect of the first iteration, who carried their blessings on to be worthy successors.

However, while they had many successes in their career, eventually, they took on a job they shouldn't have--at the behest of Chain Link's desperate request, they helped out in the event that'd become known as the Fall of London. All but Webster were killed in this encounter, like most that participated. Having gotten in well over their heads, they were simply outclassed.

Gridlock and Timewarp would later be revived by Horseman (see below).

The third iteration of Heroes 4 Hire, led by the shellshocked Webster, were based largely around replacing his lost teammates.

Canvas, his replacement for Gridlock, had the ability to paint reality in front of him.

Rigger, his replacement for his brother Streamline, was a tecchie with a specialty in jury-rigging devices together; he would connect things, devices, technologies, that were otherwise unrelated, to create a hodgepodge of various useful devices, albeit haphazard and prone to malfunctions. This power was more versatile, able to make anything from anything, but more unreliable, because the things created weren't guaranteed to work.

Spacewarp, his replacement for Timewarp, didn't exactly warp space--instead, he created the vacuum of space, surrounding him. As in. It literally was like anything surrounding him in a ten-foot radius was physically transported to outer space, with all the effects that would entail. No gravity, no air, really cold, etc.

However, Webster in his inexperience as a leader made a mistake when recruiting them; they were focused too much on the 'Hire' and not enough on the 'Heroes'. Eventually, all three of them at once turned traitor on him, out of pure, sheer, unadulterated greed; not satisfied with their earnings, they betrayed Webster and allied with a villain in order to seize more money than Webster could ever hope to offer them.

For their trouble, Webster killed them all.

However, undaunted, he eventually succeeded in recruiting two new members, and eventually, managed to recruit a fourth and final member for the fourth iteration. (The story would follow the fourth member as the protagonist, in spite of Webster being the main character. He joins a month or so after the other two are recruited.)

Which leads to a team comprised of:

Gong has a fairly lame-sounding set of abilities. His skin turns into a metallic brass-colored substance. In this form, he is pretty much indestructible. He doesn't need to breathe (though he can't eat or drink in this form, meaning he does need to exit it), he is resistant to most powers, has some heat resistance in particular, things that pierce or slash will bounce off harmlessly, etc.

However, his main power is in the absorbing of kinetic energy and soundwaves...which, at will, he can unleash in the form of an omnidirectional, audible, blastwave, emanating a series one after another of shockwaves. He is, quite literally, what you'd expect a gong in human shape to be.

Yet this power has some added benefits. His footsteps are absolutely silent, making him good at being unheard, and they allow him to run at an increased speed, giving a limited form of superspeed. Yet by far the most intimidating factor about him isn't what power he has, but what he's like without it; he stands at a quite tall 6'6", and has an absolutely ripped physique, lined with muscles, solidly a wall of pure strength.

That's not a power, by the way. That's just a result of gifted genetics plus a hard workout regiment he stuck to long enough to produce those results. Yet in tandem with his power, they make him utterly unstoppable. He's indestructible, but he packs a mean punch, which can be augmented by unleashing his shockwave. He's a lightning bruiser, fast, implacable (you can't knock him down), invincible (you can't hurt him), and yet strong enough to hit hard.

That's not to say it's impossible to win against him, of course. In terms of superpowers, this is basically just B-list, if that. He's just smart enough to pick and choose his battles such that he never encounters an enemy who could puncture through his power. (Which would be possible; his own teammate might be able to, and it was the 'might' which was enough to cause him to back down from attacking said eventual-teammate. He was in no rush to test the theory out.)

He used these skills to become a freelance bodyguard/bouncer/enforcer, and picked up the skills you might expect from this. Again, these are trained skills, not from a power, but he's quite excellent at picking up on deceptions (both from people and from facts), is a skilled chef, knows how to mix many drinks, and is well-versed in the culture of music (and is respectable good as a deejay).

He ended up working for Webster after fighting Overload in their first encounter, which Webster intervened in and offered them the deal--one which he decided to take, since the pay was decent enough and the cause was something he could support.

He's by far the oldest of the group, being around 27, give or take a few years.

Overload has a fairly restricted power as well. He's got an incredibly limited form of dynakinesis. He can trap energy of most forms (particularly, light/heat/sound), and then cause it to build up, charging up, until it has built up into a bomb. He can then unleash this charged up energy in one of two forms: an omnidirectional blast, or a directed-from-his-palm beam.

If he's knocked unconscious while charging, he'll default to unleashing the omnidirectional version. This ability is only as strong as the combination of "strength of the energy captured * time energy has been building". He is limited in how much energy he can catch to as much as will fit in his right hand (the only way he can use his ability, in fact).

So if he's literally just grabbing air, and stirring it around in his hand, to build up a charge, it will eventually be deadly, but takes a long time to get there. Whereas if he's grabbing a shockwave, then it doesn't take much time at all for him to charge up a lethal strike. Another restriction is that once he starts charging, he can't start charging something else without first discharging what he's got.

The omnidirectional version is weaker and limited in range, whereas the beam version is very easily predicted. Prior to working for Webster, he did not use his powers much, pretty much only using them for self-defense. He followed his older brother into the life of a petty criminal in fact--picking up skills like pickpocketing, lockpicking, hotwiring, hacking, general thievery stuff like optimal ways to break and enter, the like.

Webster incentivized him to stay by appealing to his inner good nature, his ability to secure their future financially and legally, and most of all, by using his connections to get Overload's brother out of the trouble he was in (Gong was hired by people looking to collect a debt), so that they'd be able to clean up their act and use his power for good.

The new recruit, protagonist character, joining after this event by some small amount of time, is Emblaze.
Emblaze, simply, has the power to see and manipulate (to some extent) the souls of those around him. When he is closing his eyes, he can sense the souls of everyone within him (and manipulate them) within 350 feet.

When his eyes are open, he can see and manipulate the souls of anyone he has visual contact with--this contact can be miles away (say, through binoculars), or even through a video feed from a monitor. Heck, he can see (but for obvious reasons, not manipulate) the soul of someone from a recording.

This manipulation is not unlimited. He basically can sense the emotions and intentions of a soul, and can either amplify or dampen them, giving him a limited form of mind control. He can't make an angry person not be angry at all, but he can make the anger turn to hatred (intensifying it), or lessen it to its smallest amount--and because people usually feel more than one emotion at a time, he can cause a different emotion that was present to become larger, achieving much the same effect.

This is a power he uses with extreme caution. Prior to joining up, he was a con artist, scamming people, but used his power to make sure that they were blissfully, happily, unaware of the scam--and if they found out, they'd end up with their lives enriched from the experience rather than ruined. (He picked his victims well, so that at the end of the day, if the con was found out, they'd have a good laugh, learn from it, enjoy it, and move on with their lives.)

That was the extent he was comfortable using it, though after a disaster struck, he went out to help people--being able to sense where they were, he could locate them, and sensing their emotions, he was able to subtly manipulate said emotions so that things like fear were lessened to more manageable levels, lessening pain, lessening panic, basically working as a rescue worker, to relieve them, and that got him interested in being more altruistic.

He was also a gambler, using his ill-gotten goods to "waste" the money earned. Quotation marks, because for any game with a human element, he could use his power to subtly cheat. Mostly, he did it for a good time, though, and made it so that his opponents were having the time of their lives. Upping their feelings of tension, suspense, the like, and rewarding them on occasion with a thrill of the game, even as he swindled their money slowly.

His power also has a nice side-effect: remember how I described powered people as duals, because their powers come from a second soul? Guess what he can sense...and manipulate. He can't make powers disappear, so he's not a power nullifier, but he can act as a power dampener, bringing powers down...or as a power amplifier, increasing their potency.

Because he visually sees souls as flames, this is where his namesake comes from; he fans the flames of the second fire in powered people. This power also serves as a radar for incoming threats, allowing him to detect danger from any direction, and allowing him to understand the general nature of a person's powers.

Every soul has a unique signature, powers no different, and yet, similar souls have similar signatures, so if he's seen a soul of a certain power, he can generally put a ballpark on what sort of power an individual possesses. This power was how he was able to realize Webster in his introduction to the team was using a body double. (Webster, after his second team betrayed him, notably became a bit paranoid.)

He's the youngest of the group, at only 16.

Webster, the leader of the group, is the second-youngest, physically 17 and technically only 18. (Overload's also 18, but with a birthday a few months earlier.) Timewarp saved him by sending him a year into the future, documenting it, and he happened to survive the process.

He can be summed up as "two parts Taylor Hebert, one part Spider Man, one part every character using string-manipulation abilities including Razor Floss and antics like Doflamingo". His power comes in two parts. The first, at a linear rate, is an ability to generate an unlimited quality of silk.

This silk can take on whatever properties he wants it to. Sticky, not sticky; thin, thick; flexible, rigid; insulates from heat/electricity somewhat, etc. Already this is a very powerful ability, but if he just created the silk without a method of manipulating it, it wouldn't make him leader-worthy.

The second part of the ability: as long as a strand of silk he created has a direct link to his body, he has complete and total control over everything about it, a high-level form of telekinesis which serves to make the already-durable material nigh-invincible. (It's almost an immovable object, but sufficiently gamebreaking powers can penetrate through.)

Keep in mind that the strand of silk could be thinner than can be seen by the eye at the point of contact on the body...but there's no limit to how long the strand can be, so down the line it can unfold to create a gigantic construct out of silk. He can be miles away, and then create a clone a mile away...because of a single thread, which spirals out to create a fully humanoid shape, out of nothing but silk.

Indestructible silk, which can be razor-sharp.

What's more--because controlling this silk to such a fine degree requires him to basically "understand" what's happening to the silk, he has the ability to feel and hear through his silk (as long as the silk's still connected to him). (No taste, smell, or sight, though.) Everything his silk touches, he will feel with a perfect understanding and hear with a perfect level of knowledge as to sounds going on.

And he has been weaving silk into everything, for everywhere, for years now. This gives him a limited form of combat clairvoyance; if something is so much as nearby his silk (and his silk is everywhere), he'll know where it is, what it's doing, etc.

He wraps silk around everything, and this serves three purposes. One, it allows for him to call upon reserves of silk faster than he can generate them. He can still generate silk fairly fast, mind you, but in a pinch, he could need more than that amount, and if he's covered an area in silk, he can call upon it at will. Two, it allows for him to sense everything, everywhere.

And three? By creating a solid layer of silk covering something, he gains an understanding of said something...allowing him to make a fully functional copy of said something out of silk. Granted, said silk copy will only work as intended while he's got a connection to it, most of the time (unless the different properties between silk and said something are such that it doesn't matter that it's made of silk and not the material(s) of said something; a chair's probably still gonna work as silk even when cut off, but a helicopter sure wouldn't), but once he's copied an object once, he can create it from memory.

And he's been copying objects for years.

He's also used his power to its fullest multitasking degree, listening to every audiobook, music album, video, film, tv show, video game, etc. that he could (granted, lacking the visuals to go with the audio), effectively allowing him to have memorized every aspect of pop culture in existence and be insanely knowledgeable about everything.

And, yes, as a hobby, he does read the dictionary. He's also studying engineering and art, to make better use of his power, because studying those two fields is directly correlated to his usefulness. He can tie people up ridiculously easily, bind them, trap them, and whatnot, but also makes use of massive walls of silk, shields, and weapons. Swords, staves, even an automatic harpoon gun. Blunted or sharp. Whips, razor floss that cuts through everything, not to mention, creating light as a feather body armor for teammates.

He fights a lot using swarms of silk clones, and competently at that, because he can receive the memory of training from dozens of clones. (Think Naruto's shadow clones; he basically makes a ton of clones, has them attend multiple martial arts schools, and learns everything he can from them.) Also, he's learned how to manipulate his silk to create vibrations enough where he can talk through the silk as well.

And he's quite aware he's only scratched the surface of his power. He reads up on a lot of fiction to see how powers work in other settings, he reads a lot online about how powers work in his setting (which gives a bonus of making him familiar with those he's likely to encounter), drawing inspiration from everything. And anything related to powers he deems useful which he can't get a full appreciation from just sound, he'll obtain and watch/play in his real body so he can see it in person.

I feel like I'm not properly explaining many of these peoples' powers, especially the latest generation of Heroes 4 Hire, but it's time to move onto the antagonists of the story.

A group deliberately made as a mockery of Heroes 4 Hire, called Villains 4 Hire. They are, quite deliberately, structured in a way meant to antagonize Webster in every way, as they oppose him on every level. Including how their members' abilities work.

Spread, their leader, has a power that's basically Canvas's--this is through no coincidence, and is deliberately something meant to torment Webster about his past failure.

Executioner, their second in command, continues the trend as having a power that's basically Rigger's.

Void, continuing the trend even further, has a power that's basically Spacewarp's.

Horseman, their final member, has the ability to revive up to four individuals--said individuals revived are revived with absolutely no memories, no free will, no personality, but retain all their skills, including powers. (This does have the side-effect of not working on tecchies, though.)

He can only resurrect an individual once, but a resurrected individual can continue functioning until destroyed beyond the ability to...well, function. Lop off the head, no problem; cut off an arm, no issue, still works. While there are far more effective uses of the power (imagine reviving a kaiju-like opponent, e.g. reviving something like whatever kind of entity in this setting would be akin to an endbringer), for maximum psychological torturing of Webster, the three revived are the three that he saw killed before him, making a mockery of their deeds as heroes; Chain Link, Gridlock, and Timewarp.

Mind you, just because there's theoretically better uses of the power doesn't mean that the revived individuals are by any means weak; Gridlock's power is nigh-invincible, Chain Link's power still functions (and Chain Link can still speak; the revived aren't mindless, meaning he still serves as mission control...just for the villains now), and Timewarp is a useful scout to have and can cause confrontations to literally disappear from existence.

Why only three?

Horseman can use his power on people who aren't dead, but are on the brink of death, and by that, I mean, life support, would die if taken off it, individuals. However, if he uses his power on someone who isn't dead, they retain their memories, free will, personality, and such, while also retaining their status as being quite alive. Since he has no control over someone revived this way, he can only use it on an ally.

In this case, Void's being supported by this method, as Void--prior to being recruited by the Villains 4 Hire--was on life support, and needs Horseman's power to still function; if Horseman removed his support, Void would fall catatonic instantly.

That's about all I got, and is about all I will get, because the idea's as matured as it can get.

Soyeah, that was my setting idea I talked about yesterday.

Now I've been writing this blog for three hours; I need to eat, then attend to whatever I have time for before bed.

They revolve around the fact that I am sick today.
I should have obligations to attend to today--thaaaaat's not happening; I'm REALLY not up for any of them today.
Which I know will cost me big time in the long-run, but when I say I'm not up for them.
I'm just.
Not up for them.

Anything I'd do out of a sense of obligation, even if said obligation was purely to my own selfishness, I'm not up for today; the only things I'm up for today are things that I'd WANT to do.

So sure, if an obligation becomes something I want to do, I'll do it, but chances are that won't happen and instead I'll be doing other things. Like spend time with my girlfriend, or work on my civ 3 mod. (More on that in a sec.)

I did want to mention that I revisited an old idea for a game I had; a tower defense game taking a few mechanics from my favorite tower defense games (notably, Defender's Quest and Gemcraft)...but giving my own very specific spin on things that make my game innately unique and original--while it is a tower defense game, what it is also is a Time Management game (and resource management); the whole idea behind the game is that it is literally impossible to win a level unless you are using your time to min-max your defenses.

I developed a whole bunch of really neat, mostly-original mechanics, albeit ones which rather a number have obvious inspirations, and some of them are brand new to today while others have been with the idea for as long as I've had it. (And this idea is like...five, eight, years old. Somewhere in that range; it is not at all a new one. Quite often, I'll come back and revisit/revise/revitalize old ideas I've not thought about in years, and this was one such occasion.)

The main thing I did today, however, was create the plot for the game. I had an idea for the first level of the game before--and that was it. Originally, I think I had the idea that after the first level, things would continue a specific way. I decided that there'd be a better route to take, one which is entirely all the more genius with the levels and intricacy of what I build.

The mechanics mesh beautifully with the lore I established, and the plot is coherent featuring quite the cast of characters. I love the game idea, it's probably my second-favorite tower defense game I've ever designed (the favorite being a game which was blatantly self-plagiarizing from Disease, one of my pet novels...which I liked so much that Disease stole a central mechanic idea from the game, plagiarizing from the plagiarizing to be reintegrated with the original source material, but I digress).

Would be fully doable, too, if I could program in, oh, say, Flash, and could create the art assets I'd need and whatnot. Since I can't, it'll remain a fantasy in my head, though. I could technically share details on it...but this is an idea so good, I don't want to.

Yes I know, that means that I'll probably forget the genius ideas I came up with, both today and originally. (Heck I'm pretty sure I only remember about 80% of the originally planned game mechanics.) But this is one idea where I can play it out in my mind and I quite like doing so. The only incentive I'd have to bring it outside of my head is if I could actually make it reality--without a programmer volunteering and without a pixel artist volunteering (they'd also need to make faces for portraits that aren't pixels even though the art aside from portraits is pixels), it's not happening.

And since nobody reads my blog pretty much, and the few who do are so busy/swamped with real life they'd never have the commitment/free time to help me make it even if they had the appropriate skills...there's no way it's going to happen.

Alas.

What might happen, however, is my Across the Ages scenario.

I have documented (I rediscovered my actual workaround--a pray to whatever relevant gods are involved, where I copy everything, close ALL word files, keep the clipboard, reopen word, and paste it) every building and unit that, as of this moment, I can think of that'd be included. (At least, I think. I'll at some point need to double-check, but I think I'm good.)

Not the details for them.
Heck I don't have all the possible details that need to be documented for them listed at the top of them.
But I've more or less indexed them alphabetically.

What I need to do still is more or less, then, the following:
-I need to see which scenarios feature what governments. Some I know are Vanilla-only; some I know are one-scenario-only (e.g. Protestant Monarchy); the others, I need to form comparisons and see if I can potentially find compromises.

(I want each and every government to provide a distinct advantage, and for there to be no clear superior government. However, I do want slight favoritism to Imperialism as a cross-ages government, with its main rival in ancient times as the Tribal Council, Feudalism providing some viable alternative, Democracy providing a second alternative, and Fascism plus Communism being lategame rivals to it.)

-I need to group technologies together by type. What technologies make sense as working together in a progression.
-I need to also calculate how many techs I can fit in the science tree.

-I need to do the thing I just mentioned I haven't done--get all the possible details that needed to be documented, at the top of them.
-Eventually, but not right now because that'd take insanely long, I need to get said details from each and every scenario, including a vanilla civ 3 conquests game.

-I need to finish my terrain-tile-by-terrain-tile documentation of Mesopotamia, then do it for Rise, Middle Ages, Napoleon, and some of Discovery. (Top northeast corner of map.)

-I need to find the map of the world and document where the modern resources are on it, in the relevant areas.
-Not an immediate task since I need to do some of the other things below first, but: I need to document where there's resource shortages, beit luxury or strategic, and when they're present, see if I can fix it.

-I need to create a map overlay of Rise of Rome, The Middle Ages, Napoleon, and the northeast section of Age of Discovery. (This is something incredibly useful, but it is also quite challenging and rather meticulous to make. Mesopotamia was a 5800 x 2800 pixel file. Which, yes, was as huge as you'd expect, at 21 MB.)
-I need to download an art program with layers.
-I need to use said art program to manipulate the overlays such that key points common on them overlap, hitting as many key points as is possible.

I'll only be able to use two overlays at a time--but that's all I'll need, in order to get the job done. Because what these overlays are meant to accomplish is to establish exact parameters for my map (which for now I'm having as 200 x 200, hoping that's about right--but I'll be making said overlays before I'll be trying to make the map for real).

-I'll also need to document the location of cities in Age of Discovery, Napoleonic Era, The Middle Ages, Fall of Rome, and Rise of Rome, to try and get as many non-mutually-exclusive ones set up.

-Then comes the other stuff I mentioned last time.
Figuring out how to get created scenarios to track scores.
Wonder interaction fixes.
Resource display in cities.
Music from all scenarios, separated into appropriate ages.
Civ contacts being what I want.
Also stuff on the map that I know how to do more or less (cities, fog of war), just need to do them.

I'm making progress, though--quite a bit, in fact!

I just need to put the work in, bit by slow bit.

​It's coming together quite nicely, if I do say so myself.

Well, many things, but the particular aspect I'm talking about today is the divorce between what ideas I get in my head and my ability to actually bring life to them.

I swear to you, in less than ten minutes--it was on the latter half of my drive home--I came up with an idea. On a twenty minute drive I was over half done with, I came up with an idea.

Not just part of an idea.

Start to finish worldbuilding on the idea.

It lacks characters, it lacks plot. It was just an idea for a world, but start to finish, I came up with it.

The idea was more or less, "how do I make a realistic world featuring multiple species of anthropomorphic winged sapients?"
One with feathered "bird" wings.
One with 'leathery' "bat" wings.
One with "butterfly" wings.
One with "bee" wings.
One with "dragonfly" wings.

And two without wings, one off of an ant and another off of a spider.

For the world I came up with, every one of them would need at least six limbs--in that world, the norm being at least six, rather than in our world where it's the norm to have four. (Bats don't have wings, arms, and legs; they have wings and legs; same for birds. But here I wanted them to have both.)

They would need a common ancestor or two, one where their anthropomorphic features came from prior to diverging into their more insect/bird/mammal forms, because that is probably more likely a scenario than them having started from insect/bird/mammal forms and all, separately from one another, developing said anthropomorphic forms.

Specifically, an ancestor that'd require bipedal movement and an opposable thumb, sized about our size but with at least a second set of "arms".

They would also require a great degree of long-term separation, and, a climate where all but the non-fliers were in a position where the mutation allowing flight gave a strong survival advantage. My thought on the world was then one with many sudden sharp increases and decreases in altitude, uneven surfaces in most locations, small islands which're mostly mountainous, probably covered in trees.

Where walking is sometimes necessary, but where flying is usually much easier to cross vast distances. Leading to a world with two large continents and five groupings of islands. Seven total "continents" if you will, even if five of said continents aren't one single landmass. (At least, not one landmass above water.)

To favor flight over traversing waters, currents in the air would need to be fairly easy to travel, whereas inversely, currents on the water would need to be much, much more hazardous than in our world, deterring evolution of an amphibious lifestyle. 

The separation between these continents would need to be strong enough to keep contact from overlapping for a long time, but not quite make it so that it's impossible for them to have traveled there in the first place and millions of years down the line to reconnect.

The obvious answer I came up with is paralleling our world, with an ice age. The beginning and/or end of an ice age would either allow for contact or cut contact off; similarly, the change in climate would spur a necessary change in the needed mutations to survive.

I didn't quite come up with whether it was the ice age starting or ending which caused the isolation, even though the world is distinctly different depending on which of the two it is. If the ice age starting caused the isolation, the sapient life forms evolved in cooler conditions with their adaptions, and it can be hypothesized that the end of the ice age helped spur them into spreading out.

If the ice age ending caused the isolation, the sapient forms evolved in warmer conditions with their adaptions, and it can be hypothesized that there was some other factor other than ice blocking them from spreading out--a factor they could only overcome with technology rather than biology.

In the former, a potential cause of the isolation is an inability to maintain a long enough distance of flight to travel the distance.
In the latter, a potential cause of the isolation is isolated weather conditions, where it's easier to get into the islands than it is to get out. 

These ideas aren't well fleshed out, but they are what I came up with in the ten minutes. They aren't well-researched, because if they were then a lot of what I said would sound more plausible and be more grounded in fact rather than just my shaky guess at how things could potentially work, with my incredibly limited knowledge of biology and geology and the like. (I know almost nothing, and thus, my lack of knowledge hurts the chances of making the idea I came up with seem realistic.)

What I really hate isn't the lack of ability to flesh that part out, though.
So much as it is.
My lack of ability to flesh out each of the species I described.

I created a mental picture of each and every single one of them.
I created a basic idea of how their lifestyle would work. Their biology, their culture(s), and how the other species view them (including slur words used to describe them).
But while the ideas are formed in my head, loosely.

I can't extrapolate them in reality.
I can't bring them out into reality, because to bring them out into reality I would actually need to make them, with skills that I lack.

I'd need to draw them.
I'd need to, from that drawing, create "profiles". You know the like. In almost every webcomic featuring races (heck doesn't need to be nonhuman, many webcomics simply with fictional cultures do much the same), you see this sort of thing.

Where you get an image or two showing the typical image meant to portray them, and then a list of the relevant information about them.

I'd need to create that.

And after doing that.

Weave them together to form the details.

And the worldbuilding for each of them is rough, at best.

Yet the worldbuilding as a whole is even worse, because it takes the roughness of all of those, then is meant to weave them together, to create the modern world of whatever story this would be for.

What technologies would such societies with these described biologies have? These would be influenced by their culture as well--diet, beliefs, interactions, etc. How they finally made contact, and how they didn't manage to wipe each other out, and how they managed to understand each other, and what ideas between their separate cultures were exchanged and so on and so forth.

What nations would exist, how intermingled would the races be? (The world I'm aiming for would be "enough where it's not uncommon to have all featured in a single location for the story", but not "so much where there's no separation outside of isolated pockets". Where there's dominant races in different areas, but enough variety to not be uniform in most areas.)

What technologies would they develop we never would, what technologies we have would they never develop? All of this is possible to create from what I have, but it'd need that first step--of bringing what I made in my head, out into the real world.

And beyond what I've done here.
Mostly generics, mostly stuff about the world itself.
I can't do that.

Which is the frustrating thing I hate.

A brilliant, fantastic idea in my head--a full world, built in ten minutes. Ten minutes, to do all of what I described and then some. In a lifetime I'd never be able to bring it out. The full world's loosely functional; rough around the edges and in desperate need of concrete details, but it's there​...and it'll remain there, nowhere else, because this is as much as I can do with it.

...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!