It is an absence that is, mostly, not my fault.
I could've made a blog entry yesterday night--that's my fault; I forgot. So no blog Monday, totally my fault.

No blog on Sunday, Saturday, or Friday?

Not so much.

There was a three-day period without internet. Three solid days.

​Still recovering today.

I did have a new story idea come to me. Basically a shonen manga. The protagonist is a pre-transition in the closet transwoman who dies--as she is, very clearly, unhappy with this and dissatisfied, feeling unfulfilled in her life with a bunch of unfinished business due to not having gotten to live her life as her, she ends up in a lesser circle of Hell.

Hell, in this setting, is basically made up of a combination of those who did great atrocities causing endless suffering and are unrepentant about it, and those who cannot find happiness in death even if they have the ability to move on.

If they cannot be at peace with their demise, especially if they have negative feelings, Hell it is for them. If they ever get to be at peace, they can move on, but for as long as they cannot accept their death, for as long as they cannot resolve their issues, they are stuck in Hell.

In this sense, Hell is a little like a jail in that theoretically, anyone within can move on. If someone who has caused great harm genuinely sees the error of their ways, recognizes the pain they inflicted, is remorseful of it, then they have the chance to move on (tho they may be stuck in Hell if they're unable to find a way to get redemption).

If someone who hasn't caused great harm, but hasn't accepted their death, finds a way to accept it, they can move on.

Hell is overseen by the ultimate exemplifiers of both of these traits: demons, who're technically fallen angels; they were never human, but they did great atrocities (it's how they became fallen after all) and cannot be at peace with their situation. There's multiple types of demons, all of them immensely powerful in Hell.

Theoretically, tho, even a low-rank angel can not only go toe-to-toe with the strongest of demons (demons retain a lot of angelic power, but lost a lot of it in their fall), and yes, outrank them. Angels mostly stay out of Hell to not interfere with the process of Hell to reform individuals, but can intervene if they feel their presence is necessary for a soul that's close to moving on.

Hell, in this setting, works a lot like Earth. (Even with Earth technology!) You can't truly die, but all pain you experience is amplified. If you don't eat, you become really hungry and will eventually collapse from fatigue, and even pass out (which is not pleasant, see below). If you don't drink, you become parched with thirst and will eventually collapse from dehydration, and even pass out (which is not pleasant, see below).

If you don't sleep (you need to sleep), you become fatigued, experiencing incredibly amplified duress during this time, and eventually, your efforts to avoid sleep will fail, and you'll collapse, passing out, from exhaustion eventually.

And sleep? During the time you sleep, you don't dream. You relive aspects of your life, including seeing the feelings and thoughts of others, up to and including personally feeling your death, amplified, many times over, repeated multiple times. "Life flashing before your eyes", only much much worse.

Fatigued-induced sleep makes it much much worse. You relive it not only with even more sensations, but for a much much much longer period of time.

If you suffer a would-be fatal injury, you not only experience the full pain of your original death but of the new death, and stay that way until your wound heals.

While the unrepentant monsters are mostly kept in a different, deeper, section of Hell, by and large, the entirety of Hell is left to run amok as people see fit. Meaning that you've got to fend for yourself. You can form bonds with others, friendships, even create societies, but you can constantly be attacked by people who're warlords commanding literal armies of the Damned.

In that world where you're up against literally billions (not quite trillions; not everyone goes to Hell and quite a lot who did move on) of humans, and even against quite-often-malicious demons, you're basically subject to their whims. You follow their rules or suffer for your disobedience.

Hell does have things like landmarks, a map, and such, but due to being infinite and, largely, the same weather (there's frozen areas for frozen hells and water areas for damp hells but it's mostly fire and brimstone of various kinds), it's a pretty bleak place occupied by pretty bleak individuals that're largely hard to befriend owing to them all having various issues of their own.

And the protagonist finds herself in Hell, struggling.

But it's discovered that she has a fairly rare power for a human; the power to manifest her soul's will, and the willpower to control it. (Both are, individually, rare, but having both is even rarer.) On the one hand, this gives her magical powers that you'd expect in any shonen series, making her able to fend for herself, be able to stand up against anyone except others with this power and Demons who have a similar, but inherently innately stronger, version of the power. Meaning she, unlike most denizens of Hell, won't be repressed by the rules of those around her.

On the other hand: the power to manifest her soul's will with the willpower to control it makes her an actual threat: if she can escape to the real world, she has the strength to partially manifest on Earth. She can't come back from the dead, but she could disrupt the world as what amounts to a ghost akin to a poltergeist, a fairly big threat.

After gaining control over this power and learning of what it can give her, she becomes what's known as a "Third-Generation Succubus". First-generation Succubii are a specific type of Demon. Second-generation Succubii are descendants of those Demons (Demons' ability to procreate is limited, but not nonexistent altogether, and children of Demons are fully fertile with absolutely no restrictions), and have the same traits, just with less bounding to Hell.

Third-Generation Succubii are purely just humans. Humans, nothing demonic/angelic about them, that just so happen to have a specific type of powersets that represent nearly-identical powers to their demonic namesakes. (Inherently weaker than their Second/First-Generation counterparts tho.)

Those powers include shapeshifting, accelerated healing that lacks pain (getting hurt still hurts, but healing is done with less pain), enhanced charm (manifests as a passive influence on the emotions of others but also increases self-confidence and allows for easier smooth-talking, essentially granting the user a silver tongue), enhanced strength/speed/endurance/stamina, increased empathy (manifests as pseudo-telepathy, in being able to sense the feelings of others nearby and increased analytical abilities to guess at what this means), and pure energy manifestations of handheld objects:

Swords, bows, guns, shields, knives, etc.

Oh, and also: they have incredible lust and instantly heal from having consensual sex, and are vastly powered up from having had it, and the more often they have consensual sex, the stronger they become.

And thus her journey as a protagonist begins, where she fights and makes friends.

It continues to develop in my mind, and I had a bit of an idea with it:
By taking advantage of it being a first-person story, what if the protagonist could, mistakenly, have self-diagnosed himself (with the help of those he was surrounded by as a kid) as a sociopath, without him actually being one? For him to have been called a narcissist, sociopath, psychopath, etc. due to struggling to understand the feelings of others and seemingly lacking emotions of his own. (But him not actually being any of those.)

Over time, as he got into the teens, he learned to fake these responses, and even exaggerate them: he became a large ham, grandiose, extremely bold, outgoing, confident, even arrogant, showing the typical traits of a supervillain: charm, incredible intelligence, witty banter, a level of snark, a fondness for puns, grandiose demeanor and overcomplicated plans, a fondness for loquaciousness, and the like.

And while he maintains a respectable social life, he's still even now polarizing with a lot hating him (and him knowing they hate him) even though plenty like him, and him remembering the comments from when he was younger and couldn't fake these responses.

Still convinced he's a sociopath, and very aware that all of the traits he displays are perfect for being a villain--and then he gains his superpowers and realizes they are perfectly suited for being a supervillain. And he wants the infamy of it as well as the fortune a supervillain can accrue, and just basically assumes that due to being a sociopath with the hamminess of a villain and power set suited for a villain, along with what his ambitions are, of being recognized and appropriately feared and having the pull, the weight, appropriate for his status, that it's inevitable he is going to be one, so he starts his plans to become one.

And then, panicking at the presence of a known threat that could harm him (he's invulnerable from the outside, but some threats can bypass external armor so to speak and this was one of them), in public before having donned his uniform, he uses his powers, and people assume he is an emerging superhero.

He initially thinks this could be an opportunity to take down the superheroes from the inside, thus setting up the narrative for the story, but there's a rather obvious twist, which becomes quite obvious to those with familiarity with conditions: no, he is not a psychopath or sociopath. He's not even a narcissist. Or any Cluster B personality disorder, or Cluster A, or Cluster C, or Haltlose, or Immature, he's none of those.

He is, however...an incredibly high-functioning autistic individual, who despite being on the autism spectrum, is high-functioning enough to have not gotten diagnosed with it, with people assuming he was just a normal, if a bit "mean", distanced, etc., kid.

And yes this does take inspiration from my own life with what I've been called before. (I've been called a narcissist; I've been called some condition similar to narcissism which may be in the Cluster B or Not Specified sections, don't remember what it was; I've been called a psychopath/sociopath; I am in fact none of those, as it's actually being a high-functioning autistic adhd-laden bipolar disorder-suffering transwoman.)

But that's exactly why I think I can write it and write it well.
The ability to mix fiction tropes, like Good Feels Good and multiple supervillain tropes like Large Ham, with a dose of reality with it being a very real underlying condition that went undiagnosed, is right up my alleyway.

And I kinda think I can do it.

...And frustratingly, while there is a spark of creativity to be had in the depression, it is rehashing material I already have made, rather than creating actual new material.

Basically.

When I am depressed, I frequently get bouts of creativity, in spite of the depression. That is to say. There's a difference between manic phases where I'm inspired to create things, and depressed phases where I'm inspired to come up with things that I later create when manic.

Which is to say.

During Manic phases, I am almost never coming up with a brand new idea--the mania is putting effort into creating an idea that I had at an earlier time.

Said earlier time is usually a depressive phase, where I was suffering from depression, where I couldn't get the ability to create something, but I at least write it down (or make mental note of it), with the hope of making it later.

Yet there are also depressive episodes where instead of creating new material, I simply reinforce the memory of older material.

Which is all fine and good if I didn't write that material down the first time, but utterly worthless if I did because it is giving me literally nothing new.

Tonight is one of those nights, covering the superhero/villain stories I've been thinking up as of late.

There were at least one or two supervillain stories taking place in fantasy settings.

I actually wrote a partial blog on one Worm-inspired (with the way superpowers work) superhero group, Heroes 4 Hire, although I went into extensive material I didn't blog about, some of which I don't think I ended up writing down anywhere but which I believe is mostly memorized (aside from some side-characters, probably). I believe it was to be written in third person.

I'm pretty sure the next Worm-inspired story, Requiem, about the titular supervillain (whose powers have nothing to do with 'his'--it's complicated--supervillain name, a common theme of the story being deception and subversion of typical trends of supervillains), who is...probably one of the most interesting POV characters I've ever come up with. (The entire story being first person past tense, narrated by the titular character.) Short version short: a closeted transwoman gains the ability to create a second body, which she uses to live the life of a normal (slightly younger) girl, but because she still has to live in her original (pre-transition, still closeted) body and she could at the time only be conscious in one body at a time, eventually she ends up venting her frustrations with the creation of a third body, who becomes a supervillain. (Incidentally, this allows them to have 2/3 bodies conscious at the same time.)
The power evolved is something of a combination of Genesis's power from Worm (basically, consciousness in an illusionary body) with Harem's power from Grl Genius (basically, it's one brain in three bodies, so it is still fundamentally the same person in all bodies), with the side of Mystique and Ant/Giant-Man, in that the projected form has the basic shape locked as human, but can be any sized/shaped/formed human. Her original body, the closeted one, is still fragile and frail, her projected second body is technically empowered but actively avoids using her power and maintains a constant form and is trying her hardest to live as a normal human, and their third body is usually in the form of a male villain who is the public head of an on the rise villain group.

Then there was the story, pretty sure I did a partial blog on this one, about the (also first person) story about Projection, the name of someone whose life splits into two parallel universes (alternating in viewpoint between the two), one a hero, the other as a villain, with them dreaming about the entire daily life of their other universe's self. This one does have one slight Worm-like aspect to it, but of the three takes the least. (Heroes 4 Hire takes an almost identical concept to 'shards' like Worm has for explaining superpowers; Requiem has semi-frequent battles against Kaijus invading from the Eldritch Dimension in a way strongly resembling Endbringers; this story has superpowers being closely tied to the emergence of creatures who're mostly small, but on rare occasions spawn gigantic endbringerest/kaijuesque city-destroying threats.)

And then there was the story that I can best describe as "Dungeons and Dragons meets My Hero Acadamia meets Worm" in that it's an Urban Fantasy based in modern times of a D&Desque world with modern technology and magic, while existing, being largely obsolete, adventuring being an outdated career, etc. (think pretty similar to that Pixar picture with the two brothers seeking their dad, actually, tho I had this idea before that film was released), with a twist; a significant portion of the population (especially prominent in humans, which is theorized to be a contributing factor in humanity's dominance as the most prolific species) has the ability to transform into a hybrid form between their race and some other race. Human-dog having a werewolf form is easier to explain, but it can also be, sayyyyy, elf-troll hybrid form, or dwarf-dragon hybrid form, to give an idea of the variance involved.
And then, of those with this transformation, a small number of them have defies-the-known-rules-of-the-universe (magic having been studied to a science, magic is a known rule of the universe) superpowers, superpowers that go beyond the scope of any known magic, racial ability, etc. (I quite love this story; the Worm similarities come from the protagonist and her goals, tho I admit I do struggle to write her. I'm also not quite sure on her identity. I'm not sure if she's a her, if she's genderfluid, if she's nonbinary, or if she's a transman. Her alt-form is male; that I know, but I haven't figured out her identity. Also, tho I am a transwoman, I was raised 'male' so it's unfortunately painfully obvious that her writer hasn't lived the life of a woman and that she's being written by someone who was raised 'male'. I'm a girl, but I struggle to write from the mindset of a woman whose femininity is a major plot point. I've written POV characters that were female, but whose character wouldn't change at all if male. This is a character who fundamentally would be different if male, and in the writing it shows how bad I am at this. Regrettably.)

​And then there is the story whose only title I can think of is, "Threadripper and Kinesis", with the point of view character being the villain protagonist Kinesis. This is the first story since Heroes 4 Hire to feature a decidedly male protagonist (I specifically wrote Kinesis and Threadripper to be brothers), tho I admit it is also the least distinct of the stories I've got. It's got the same aesthetic as the other stories; supervillain protagonist duels regularly with hero antagonists, with the story documenting their rise to power. But the closest thing it has to a unique draw is the brothers' reasons for becoming villains: a genuine belief that the lifestyle of a villain where you are prepared for constant betrayal and your allies turning on you and heroes wishing to jail you is better than the lifestyle of a hero where any betrayal is devastating and the mortality rate is much higher for both them and their loved ones. (Mortality rate from villains is almost exclusively either other villains, or heroes going on a roaring rampage of revenge to avenge slain loved ones where the villain killing said heroes' loved ones seals their fate.)
This is the story with the best romance out of any of my recent adventures into superheroes/villains, tho, so I am actually considering playing that up and making this my first romance novel.
(The only other romance novel I've ever considered writing has the basic high concept of "I can write a Twilight that is better than Twilight", just with a different supernatural common entity from vampires and werewolves. Which actually wouldn't be just one book, mind you. It'd be three core books, each with their own unique female protagonist. But I digress.)

​And most recently?
I've begun to develop a supervillain story, loosely inspired by multiple different sources. Taking from the Fitz-Simmons Agents of SHIELD dynamic, taking from Narbonic's Dave-Helen dynamic, and the Dr Kinesis-Alice dynamic from Evil Plan.

Which is basically.
Some works have a hardware-software duo; some works have an omni-bio-scientist and an omni-tech scientist.

This work splits the difference and divides it up into three characters. The protagonist, a transwoman who starts the story having recently graduated college with her multiple phDs in multiple fields (expert in biological matter in general of all kinds, from fungii to virii to bacteria to humans to animals), who also is a young mother (due to an accident in experimenting on herself--short version short, she accidentally impregnated herself with her own biological sperm, squicky as that may sound, and she is constantly worried about the development of her daughter as a consequence; she originally got into her field to improve herself, but stayed in the field to do everything possible for her daughter).

She also has the superpower of what amounts to an alternate dimension which works a bit like Star Trek transporters with a side of replicators (this explanation should be familiar to those who saw me talk about how Riders work in Red Hood Rider; same basic mechanic, only more powerful here); she places objects into her dimension, where she stores them; she can recall them (and even duplicate them en masse) out, and these copies last for a considerable amount of time and are enhanced in durability due to basically being hard light).

To use this superpower effectively, she has a masters in coding (she needed working understanding of programming code to help her understand the 'coding' of her superpower), and in the process she gained an associate's in some hardware-oriented field as well. (Research not fully done on this story, cut me some slack.)

She is hired to be the third head of a supervillain organization led by two other supervillains, the hardware and software guys, who basically have a similar diversification. The one with the superpower of healing has a masters in (some human-oriented medical field, research not done yet) to use it and a minor in the alt-field; the one with the superpower I've yet to come up with has the minor in (bio field) and master in the healer's field.

All three are, essentially: supergenius mad scientists that're aspiring evil overlords, with superpowers to use on top of their existing scientific abominations (since they do do mad science with both modifying their own biology and using mad science gadgets, on top of also using their superpowers).

I've made all of these stories in my head.
I've, tonight, made new material for none of them.
I've done writing on none of them recently.

​Thus, depression sucks.

That depends on what I manage to do tonight. So tomorrow, I may move it back one day, two days, or no days, depending both on tomorrow and today. Basically: I might not be doing Phyrra and Cyrus tonight (tho it's not off the table altogether), but I did have an idea which I want to investigate. (Basically, I was thinking of making a tiktok and releasing daily videos with a particular gimmick.)

​But today, in a blog that will last until at some point the site inevitably removes the content, fails, or something of that sort. As in, a blog that will presumably last a fair amount of time rather than remain invisible. A public blog that may not last forever because no website does and websites can pull stunts like deleting content on them. (And weebly isn't a site I have much trust in.)

I wanted to, in a broader platform, put on here what amounts to a slight copy-paste of blog-worthy material I've been placing elsewhere. (Heck, it was those answers which actually got me back to blogging here.)

Someone asked me what I think is my most useful talent/skill. I told them that it's my bottomless barrel of creativity and ideas.

I literally come up with a bunch of ideas every day. Some are for things to do in games. E.g. builds in League, ideas for things to do in minecraft, comps to test out in tft, customizing modded versions of Civ 3 in the Civ 3 editor.

Some are for things in real life, which I would do if I had the resources to do.

Most are for various different forms of entertainment, though:
Video games that I come up with that I'd love to create, if not for lacking the skills.
Webcomics that I come up with that I'd love to create, tho sadly most are too ambitious given my level of skill.
Stories, usually novels (but occasionally shorter ones), that I (mostly--some are rather ambitious) have the capacity to create, if I focused on them and dedicated myself to making them.
Songs that I lack the skills to create.
Music that I mentally compose but have no way of bringing to reality.
Animated stories that I would love to create but which with what little research I have done would cost in the range of one million dollars to actually fund (due to animators being expensive and voice actors being expensive--keep in mind, one million dollars is the amount I estimated with animators/voice actors working at just below market rate, and that it's closer to 1.5 million if they charge market rate or higher).
(Heck, I've also come up with ideas for becoming a streamer, doing tiktok videos, maybe dabbling in youtube creation!)

I can pitch to people my ideas and they will always go, "That sounds so COOL!", pointing out how awesome, amazing, and unique the idea is, how incredible it sounds, how they wish it was made (so do I! My greatest regret is that all of the beautiful things inside my mind that will never be created because in spite of how rich their worlds/characters/etc. are I cannot make them all), and how they wish me luck in my creative endeavors.

But then I can't actually make them.

Yet they appear on a daily basis.

Literally almost every day, I am creating a new idea.

But even if I could commit to an idea, each idea would take, what? A year? Two years? At minimum to pull off. (Some ideas I've calculated could take ten years to pull off!) A year or two, for one idea; new ideas, every single day.

I make new ideas faster than I could ever create them.

And few, if any, of them are bad. Most are wonderful, vivid, unique, breathtaking, highly creative, and just...overall. Something that should be made, which had every right to be made.

They just...aren't.

And then there's always the chance.

That I go my entire life without bringing any of them to a fully, wholly, entirely realized life. Where they are, in completed form, distributed across the world for all to have access to. There's a chance literally nothing I ever dream up ends up being made. After all. I've been actively trying since I was 13 (I've been making things my whole life, but 13 was the first time I had the idea of marketing these ideas to others outside of my brain), and that was 14 years ago--

In 14 years of trying, I've yet to succeed. In 14 years of trying, I've not once managed to pull it off. I've always fallen short, I've always failed, eventually, at some point.

That doesn't mean succeeding on my own is impossible, or that I've given up entirely. I haven't. I just need to be realistic in accepting that, yes, I've got a very high hill to climb.


Not gonna lie tho--
Something I really really wish I had was a sort of 'life manager', or at least, 'idea manager'. Where I could have someone who could keep me on-track, keep me on the road to success, remove the distractions from my life or at least strictly budget them, force me to work on things even when I don't want to, find ways to work with me to focus my creative energies, brainstorm my ideas with me, and with their push, get me to make them real.

But, I don't think that's something I can get. Not for free, anyway, and I certainly don't have the money to pay someone to do that. It's also something which I imagine would be more effective to be done in-person, both because I am liable to forget things online, procrastinate, etc., and it's harder to get things on-track online compared to in-person. I can definitely say there's a huge difference between my dear friend reminding me to do something and my mom or older sister (both of which I live with) reminding me to do something.

The former, I may do, but not always, and often with delay. The latter, I may do with delay but almost always WILL do, often immediately.

I know that if I had someone who could do that sort of thing for me, I would, guaranteed, succeed--but waiting for a person like that to show up and accepting defeat before then is something that will mean I never will succeed.

So I try to make do without, to try on my own. With a very very low success rate, but trying > not trying, waiting, and hoping that in the future some mystical force will come to my rescue/aid.

I was also asked what ideas I would make if I had the time/focus.

​The big one would be Phyrra and Cyrus, an anime-style 2D animated (ideally posted onto the web) series. Separated into four seasons, each approximately 12 episodes (tho I believe the last season would do better with 2-4 extra, for 50-52 total instead).

The basic premise; the world (the working universe title was INFINIverse/INFIverse, but I found out both of those names for a universe were taken so I settled on colliniverse, the origin of that being the collision between INFINITY and Nothingness) is a High Fantasy world. The protagonists, Phyrra (a swordswoman) and Cyrus (a tactician/strategist) Thaumason (Thaumason is pronounced almost identically to 'Thompson', just instead of a soft 'puh', it's a soft 'muh', and is about as common a surname in Lilim as Thompson is on earth), are twin (fairly mature-for-their-age) 11-year-old adventurers, with aspirations to become the greatest adventurers of all time--even in the world of Lilim (the name of the planet), this is an unusual oddity, since most adventurers start at least at 16, if not 18, with the average adventuring age being 16-36.

They didn't want to wait that long, but they realize their young age will be held against them. Their goal is to seek out the legendary artifact, the Book of Infinity (which, in actuality, is a remnant of INFINITY itself, but to explain that I'd need to give an explanation for what INFINITY was), which rumor states is able to grant the user(s) any power they imagine, including ability to magically age oneself.

In the first episode, they succeed--they find the book in the same chamber containing the four major elemental books (Book of Fire, Book of Water, Book of Air, Book of Earth), and they manage to actually activate the book of infinity...which triggers the curse/trap of the book. Designed to kill any individual who touched the book, when both of them grabbed the book at the same time, it instead switched their souls, placing Phyrra in Cyrus's body and Cyrus in Phyrra's body. However, it also gave them access to magic (magic, in this world, can be learned by anyone...but it takes approximately 30 years to master, and even 'spellbladers', who use specialized specific lesser magic oriented on one specific trait, are typically in their 20s), as well as the ability to access and master the four elemental books.

To escape, they activate the book of air, summoning its guardian, Gora the Rock Golem (all elemental books are protected by their opposite element), who helps teach them the spell necessary to leave. And from there, their adventure continues. The cast of the Thaukama (Thaumason + Nakama portmantu) expands to include Ace Samson, a teenaged adventurer skilled in tracking, ranged weaponry, and medicine (think the DND class of 'Ranger'); Cedrick (don't have his last name memorized, oof), their initial rival adventurer, a spellblader whose magic is specific to telekinetic control of platinum spheres; Kaze, the Wind Shade (guardian of the book of earth); Myra, the Siren/Mermaid/Sea Serpent (guardian of the book of fire); Bard Tune Song, a teenaged street rat (think an even more hypercompetent Aladdin) whose father was a powerful Demon that resembles a werewolf; Clara (also don't have her full name memorized, oof), an apprentice Paladin (Paladins being a specific spellblader school specializing in light magic); Hera, the Dragon Phoenix (guardian of the book of water); William Grant Clemency, an Adept (basically, can see the true nature of things) who is nobility in Lilim's New World (largely uncivilized new continent, think America circa 1700s); Lilian Rose Wolfe, a tailor; and Alena (also don't have her full name memorized, oof), a young Botanist/Alchemist.

Throughout their adventures, they fight monsters, villains, evil overlords, and make their name known, all while seeking a way to undo their switched souls...because as long as they are in each other's bodies...they won't age so much as a day, and are stuck eternally 11 until such a time as they figure out how to undo the curse permanently.



I can explain more, like the way the four worlds (afterlife, demon realm, spirit realm, mortal realm) work, the way spirits work, the way demons work, various magitek items involved in the setting (they have stuff which basically is on the level of a smartphone), etc. but I think the idea is clear enough.

I originally thought that there would be much much heavier themes involved regarding the body swap, that it'd touch more heavily on issues like effectively being trans--but over time, I realized that in spite of the body swap, it's actually only a minor thing. Something that, yes, comes up, and yes, is essential to the plot, but which is only a minor thing. It's a story of adventurers first, a coming of age story second, and has the issues of the body swap only third.

I have names for almost every episode; I have mentally worked out almost every episode; I basically know what happens, when, down to the episode, with entire plot arcs mapped out.


But, 1: I have no experience writing for an animated project, I have no clue what I'm doing, and,
2: Animation is ludicrously expensive. Initial google search I did right now says one second of animation is $150 at the cheapest--times that by 60 for one minute, times that by ~25 for the length of the episode, times that by 48-52, and you get: $225,000 * 48-52. (I did a google search two years ago and I think that one said $30/second, which is cheaper, but still hugely expensive.)
Just for the animation.
And then you've gotta hire voice actors.
Not to mention, composers to compose the music for the series.
Not to mention, video editors for sound effects.

It might be possible to get a kickstarter going for the project. But to get a kickstarter, I need to be in a position better than what I am in now. Plan is to write the initial script for all the episodes, try and map it out loosely scene by scene, roughly estimate the amount of time it takes, finish the lyrics for the openers/closers of each season, maybe make some loose storyboards of panels screencapping loose ideas of what I want to make, and hope the fuck that by the time I get all of this done, it's gotten me enough competency to know what I am doing to the point where I am able to justify a kickstarter to fundraise it.



All of this is ludicrously ambitious, I know, but Phyrra and Cyrus is the project I have most wanted to complete for over two years now.


If I give up on an ambitious project that I am very much out of my depth for? If I decide that I need better connections before jumping off the deep end, if I decide that I need to be established in an industry already before branching out?

Well, the main area I'd do that is in writing. Right now, mostly superhero stories. Well, one's a superhero story, but most of them are supervillain stories; I've thought up at least four different ones. Most have some inspiration from Worm, but each is distinctly their own universe, with their own rules, their own premise, their own characters, etc. Writing them is comparatively easy, and they're largely fleshed out enough where I could make any of them reality; I just haven't done them yet.

When it comes to talents I would like to have but do not possess, the obvious answer would be the ability to animate things myself. (That, or the ability to do everything necessary in editing videos. Either skill would save me a ton.)

But in skills not applicable to my ambitions...life skills. Washing/drying laundry (my mom showed me how to do it once or twice, did not stick as a skill, need to learn the ins and outs of it), washing dishes or at least how to properly handle a dishwasher (how to organize it, what to put where, what I need to do to run it, and when run, what to put where), cooking food, and also: doing makeup.

Laundry and dishes I think I can maybe figure out how to fumble through on my own, cooking is something that I haven't really done but which I may have the ability to fumble through on my own, so of these I'd say the skill I'd most want due to it being the one I least think I can fumble through on my own, would be learning how to apply makeup to myself.

I've seen makeup be applied to people before, and even have them talk through the process as they were having it applied. But in order to get good at applying makeup, I'd need to have all the supplies in front of me, and be able to freeze-frame, frame by frame, analyze with clearly visible what's-what things, step by step, work through it, and figure out what makeup is right for me.

Tho that said.

There's one skill that's both project-related, AND, real-life related: voice manipulation, as a skill/talent. Changing your voice takes lots and lots of practice and is something I lack right now, so I REALLY loathe my voice right now. And if I put in the work to have a more feminine voice, then in the process, I might pick up the skills to be able to voice some characters, or if not, at least give a better model for what I envision their voices to be. Or if not, at least hopefully allow me to sing better. Basically, lots of stuff with my voice would be useful for projects, but it's something that also would help for transitioning, too.

(Basically, overall: for a project? Animation. For real life? Makeup. For a combination of both: voice.)

​I was also asked what in 2020 I'm thankful for. In that, I instantly found my answer: ​increased presence on twitch and one community in particular there where I joined their discord and even am involved on their minecraft server.

I realize I don't have the setup for streaming, in spite of what I would want, and I realize that being involved in those communities isn't letting me spend time creating things on my own that have a tangible permanence to them (by which I mean, being involved can make me contribute to jokes, uplift spirits, etc., and my contributions there aren't meaningless since the community wouldn't be quite as good without them, but because I am one of dozens upon dozens there, while every drop I add into the pond matters, none of my additions there are something people will remember as being from me years from now; they helped, they were important, they meant something, but while you might remember the general vibe I contributed, you wouldn't remember my specific contribution to the vibe, because it's not my community, it's a community I am a part of).

Which is to say: doing stuff there isn't, for instance: making a game, writing a story, making art, making an animation. So spending time there isn't helping me succeed in any of my life's ambitions/dreams.

But I am, explicitly, okay with this, because I value that community in my life that much. They're worth it. I've asked myself if I would rather succeed in my goals or spend more time in the communities I love and remain a nobody, a person who hasn't succeeded at anything with tangible permanence to it, whose only successes are contributions to communities I am a part of but explicitly not the head of. I've asked if I'd rather strike out and succeed on my own while giving up on the communities I'm a member of, or if I'd rather remain intimately a part of those communities at the cost of increasing my odds of never succeeding in my grander goals.

The two are not actually mutually exclusive, of course. Spending less time in a community doesn't mean a total severing of ties with them; being intimately a part of a community does not mean I am guaranteed to fail at my grander ambitions.

But if it ever did come push to shove a choice between the two. I think I'd take the community I feel at home at, over the shot at success.
Ideally, I get the best of both worlds, obviously. I'm intimately involved in the community, but still trying to strike out on my own. But I value the community I'm spending time in more than I value a shot at success.

I want to succeed, but if I didn't succeed and spent a life in mediocrity, obscurity, in nothingness, but remained a part of communities I'd cherish, I would be content with that. Not happy, because I want to succeed. But content. I even developed a theory that was, more or less: almost every human has dreams and ambitions of doing great things in their lives, but most give up on these dreams and ambitions and fade into obscurity without being memorable on the grander scale of things; my theory is more or less that the conclusion I reached was the conclusion they reached, too; that it's alright, that it's okay, to not become famous, to not have tangible permanence in a legacy lasting after you are gone, if you are happy with the community you've built in life. The two are not mutually exclusive, but if forced to choose between one or the other, community > fame 9 times out of 10.

It's important to not accept defeat, to not give up, but it's also important to see how strong you value things. I value the community I've become a part of more than I value success in tangible permanence. And I know getting both isn't impossible. (Heck, basically all of the mods in that community have done exactly what I aim to do. They're becoming successful writers, artists, etc., and are successful streamers, who're building communities of their own! Yet they're still a part of the community. But their own communities, while overlapping with the community I know them from, are explicitly THEIRS, not just a carbon copy clone of the original community. I want to build a community of my own, that is truly mine, unique to me, and still be a part of that community. I know it's possible because I've literally almost a dozen examples from that community demonstrating their successes. It's just something I'm struggling with.)

I apologize for the haphazard lazy throwtogether of content I put elsewhere copy-pasted to here, but I figured it'd be good to get up on here, too.

Not that anyone reads my blogs, butstill. At least in theory, my blog is more accessible than the original location.

Well, in real life, anyway.

Four months without blogging should give you an idea of where my head has been; not great.

New, at the latest, coming out day: April 26th, 2022. That's a loose estimate, but an apt one, because I've worked on things a couple times or so, and this is what I loosely mathed it out to be, approximately.

​In addition to wanting to get back into blogging, I also want to clean up some other aspects of my life. Things will not get better unless I make them better.
Short list:
-Stay more on top of blogging
-Stay more on top of my emails (need to do this)
-Stay more on top of brushing my teeth (oof this is not going well)
-Actually do work on a project during times that I have felt 'bored' rather than wasting the time.

Now is one such time. I'm not feeling league/tft right now, I'm minecrafted out for the day, I am actually staying on top of mafia stuff (aside from tracking the queue forum), so now is the perfect time.

Well, admittedly.

I've lost two hours since I started that...

...But it was a really productive two hours, as I managed to sort almost all of my stuff on my desktop.

I'm still not sure what I will work on.

I'm thinking of attempting to write in a google doc the Phyrra and Cyrus loose script for the animation (which should be here in the notes written down what I did get done before), since I still remember my loose idea for every episode. I should also be able to find the notes reminding me of each episode's name.

It'll take a little bit of time to do, but hopefully I'll make progress.

Wish me luck on my endeavors!

​I definitely need it...

So I've been watching a fair number of people play Civilization 6 recently--I'd never play that game because I like unit stacking and more importantly I hate hex movement squares (I much prefer the square grid where you can move all eight directions), but this does instill a deep-seated desire to play Civilization III.

I've been watching a fair number of people play Final Fantasy VII Remake--similarly, that's a game I'd never play because they turned it into a hack-and-slash, one of my least-favorite genres of all (I'm like pretty sure that it's up there with button mashers and first person shooters for being a definitive three least-favorite), and while the game does offer a "classic" mode, from my understanding, even the "classic" mode doesn't really change it from being nothing like the combat in the original version of the game.

...But it does make me want to play the original Final Fantasy VII, which I happen to own on steam!

I've been playing a little more League of Legends, and it's been going pretty well! I've been winning most of my games, though I've had this unfortunate situation where in games that I was performing exceptionally well, someone on my team either hard-ints or outright leaves the game (often both) leading to an inevitable loss, and the games I am winning I am getting hard-carried because I have a terrible K/DA, terrible farming, terrible stats, and am often underperforming.

Right now, on that front, I'm experimenting with running teleport instead of heal--this was initially an accident born of forgetting to change it back to heal after playing a One For All, not noticing it. But in the match, I ended up noticing that with how I played, I wasn't in a situation where I'd be using Heal. I didn't need it to save my life, nor need it to save my allies. And in the next game, got similarly promising results, though more recent results have been mixed where I've looked at that and went, "...this would probably have been livable with heal", but it's something that's still not definitive, still not sure of.

Other than that, mostly going the same. I start with cull because it gives better lifesteal than Doran's Blade, nearly identical attack damage, and allows me to get gold for my items sooner, which I often need due to being terrible at farming. (Yes, I know, cull is an item you'd normally expect to be taken because you're good at farming. But as a starting laning phase item, it can still help if you're dismal, because one extra gold per kill can mean the difference between an item or no item when you back.)

And then it's Manamune start, boots of Ionian Lucidity at convenience, and then I'm usually by default aiming for Runaan's Hurricane into RFC into Iceborn Gauntlet, except for when I need the tankiness of the Gauntlet to not die. Not that most of my games last long enough for that, of course. Win or lose, most games end within 25 minutes pretty much without fail right now it seems.

I also like to play Teamfight Tactics daily and am currently working on an annoying tft quest involving rerolling more than five times, fifteen times. Rerolling six times is 12 gold--not including any champions you'd want to pick up. Since by the time you're rerolling, there can be 2-3 champions on any given shop you want, costing 3-5 gold...if you buy any of them...well. You get the idea. It's hard to do.

I could of course brute force it. Level up to six, doable by about Krugs, then economize until 50 gold, wait a turn to get 62, and then ignore champions to reroll six times down to 50, but knowing me, I'll cave to the impulses. Get distracted, then end up not rerolling six times.

Another thing I've been doing more is minecraft. I haven't been playing much on my friend's server (though, there's no reason for me to not, that world has an incredibly good start to it, I love what I have there, I have just about everything I'd need), but I have been playing a ton on the server for Girbeagly, one of the streamers I love to watch a lot. (He's one of many inspirations to me that makes me want to do things with my life, knowing that even if he's not super-duper-mega-famous, he's still successful and also well-connected with celebrities as friends pretty much and that's basically the sort of person I could only dream I could possibly ever become if I got godly good luck on my side.)

And, yes.

I actually do want to make that book, now, about Sam Sidney Tailor, Projection. The superhero/supervillain who made the one key choice to differentiate the direction in their life. In spite of me knowing just how hard, how difficult, it would be to actually write that and make it work. I am not some genius who can write out in meticulous, realistic, detail a masterwork like Worm. I don't have the head for the logistics to, sayyyyy, write out how a supervillain would pull a heist on a bank or such. I don't do research like that, but I'd need to, and I wouldn't know how to make it work, and there's just all sorts of similar details, and yet that passion is still there. I want to do it.

And you know what's not on that list?
Phyrra and Cyrus.
Well.
It kinda sorta is, but in a different way than the above ones.
The above I have passion and active desire to do and know what I want to do in them, too. 
For Phyrra and Cyrus, I want to make it, but it's different--there's currently not the passion/active desire to, and there's the hardest of hard writers' block on how to make it, too. I don't know what to do even though I want to. There's the objective knowledge of knowing that, yes, I need to work on it, it won't get done if I don't, but I don't know what I want to do on it, and how to do it.

And there pretty definitively is not time to do all of these.
I'd be lucky to get one of them to the point I'd be happy about, yet alone, all of them.

​I suuuuuuuuuuuckkkkk.

...It might be a small thing, but I decided to give the protagonist their name. I want to write the book in first person to avoid pronouns to let readers decide what gender the protagonist is for themselves, which required a gender-neutral name; I settled on Sam Sidney Tailor, since it seemed to just resonate with me.

Will I follow through and make a book of it?

Like I said, probably not.
I know how it more or less begins. Sam gets attacked by a phantom, fends it off, develops their illusionary energy superpower, and then the timeline splits off of their decision to use that power for themselves (the path of the supervillain) or for the good of others (the path of the superhero). 

I don't have an exact setting, the details of Sam's life down in the background, or the plot once they do split. The challenges facing the hero and facing the villain.

​But hey, this is more than what I had!

I developed the necessary background for the story. It more or less goes, the world is plagued by attacks from dark entities known as 'phantoms'. These phantoms randomly appear around the world at random times and go on rampages, before--if being left unchecked--randomly disappearing.

They come out of nowhere, and disappear just as fast, leaving a trail of destruction in their wake.

However, whenever a human is attacked by a phantom and manages to fend them off and survive...they have a chance to gain superpowers from this. This is where our protagonist gets their powers from. I also figured out the power I wanted the protagonist, who I decided--hero and villain alike--adapts the name Projection, which amounts to a specific form of 'ultimate illusion'.

In the area of about that of a house, the protagonist can flood an area in an energy, manipulating this energy to their will, but this energy is, explicitly, defined as an 'illusion'. But it's an illusion that is so, so strong as to be a local reality warp of sorts; nothing is immune to being affected by the illusion as if it were real. But the illusions can't be detected, because they technically don't exist, giving Projection a great ability to hide well.

This energy allows Projection to wrap themselves in an energy suit of sort, allowing for no need for a costume; the powers act as the costume. These illusions are absolute; nothing can break them. True sight cannot penetrate them, no sense or super sense can penetrate them, they are absolute, existing as both real and yet, not real at the same time, able to affect the environment without any true counter.

This energy cannot take the form of constructs, a la hard light. It can be manipulated in size, shape, exact form, color, and such, but mostly, it has the effect of multiple elemental powers. The energy can make energy beams, a la light beams, lightning bolts; the energy can burn; the energy can slice like wind or push like wind; it radiates as an aura of the color Projection chooses (yellow as a hero, black as a villain), and has these sorts of effects.

I chose this as the power because it needed to be a power that worked as both a hero and villain power, which was tremendously strong, but not godly strong. A power with set rules and limitations that prevent it from doing anything, yet versatile enough to allow it to do most things.

In this case, Projection has what amounts to flight by surrounding the energy around themselves and then elevating the energy off the ground, and similarly so, what amounts to a flash-step: not proper superspeed and not proper teleportation, where Projection will rapidly move from the center of their energy field to the edge of their energy field, but then has to wait for the energy to catch up before pulling this stunt again, so to speak.

The effects of the energy last after the illusion has passed. A destroyed camera will remain destroyed. Surveillance footage won't be able to make out what Projection looks like underneath their powers once the illusion is dispelled. So for all intents and purposes, the energy field is 'real', but the powers being, explicitly, illusions, give Projection the protection of their powers being undetectable, because their power while having the absolute true effect of being real, technically doesn't exist.

Because these energy illusions can't take the form of constructs, no god-like creating something out of nothing. (That, plus the limited range and the fact that it's not real and thus will disappear.) No mass-cloning, no mass creation of objects. Just a limited ability to use concussive energy, piercing energy, redirecting energy, etc.

​It feels like exactly the power I need and I love it and feel like I can actually make something out of it.

Moved back to December 25th, 2022. (That date's not gonna last.)

But today, in a spark of hope for my creativity not being dead.

Today, I came up with a story idea, and I love it--it feels like it would be easy enough to write, too. A book revolving around one critical split in time for an individual making one different choice in their life. Upon them gaining superpowers, whether they use those powers to become a supervillain or a superhero, with a dual story tracking both universes and showing the same person, just as different on the spectrum of hero/villain, and how they progress from having been identical individuals to, via their differing experiences, be different people...with a twist.

Every night, they dream of the day of their counterpart. The supervillain gets to, via their dreams, see the life of the superhero that day, and vice-versa. Eventually, near the end of the dreams, both can emerge to converse with each other, realizing that their dreams are of a very very real alternate self, and in their conversations with each other, manifest as various banter about their different decisions.

And how, while they both took different choices and have changed to be different people, they still have many core similarities. Different, but the same. They both find great fulfillment in their lives--on a fundamental level, Good Feels Good applies to the superhero, whose positive effects on society bring them genuine happiness as they see the positive efforts their contributions have made towards the world, the betterment of others, the altruism having given what amounts to a constant high of endorphins where doing good just makes them feel happy.

In contrast, the supervillain isn't pure evil, but lives a life where they consider themselves above good and evil, doing what they truly feel like, unimpeded, acting on ambition, to screw the rules of the world, the laws, to take whatever they deem to be to their liking, and to great success, living in luxury, having the thrill of the hunt, the chase, relishing in knowing that the public see them as a villain and taking pleasure in them not being able to put a stop to them. Taking everything they want, living the life they choose.

And yet, both know that the life they know, aside from being costumed so having a mask about them, is still a mask, hiding their truer personality where there are aspects of their life they don't live while masked--both of them feel 'trapped' by their role, both feel obligated to play the part they are seen as, living in partial regret of not having chosen the other option.

Once condemned as a villain, committing great atrocities, there was no going back, no ability to do good, no ability to feel good upon doing good because there was no good to be done, no opportunity, no option, no ability to see the looks of others and have their happiness bring them happiness. They had to seize happiness for themselves, they had to take pleasure into their own hands, with no choice, no option, to let it come naturally to them. A prison of being entirely self-reliant with no ability to have a life with others.

Once committed to being a hero, there was a sense of obligation, of duty, to continue doing good. The doorway into the other world was sealed off, and the continued desire to do good serves as a prison, where while happiness from their deeds would come naturally from seeing it, they feel trapped by it knowing that they can't gain happiness on their own, that they need to rely on others to obtain it. A life as a slave to others, with no ability to live on their own and get it from their own actions, entirely dependent on others to give it to them.

And beyond that--both live in isolation, feeling deeply lonely. Neither of them have true companionship, so there's a deep-seated feeling of being incredibly alone, no matter who surrounds them, no matter their circumstances, no matter who is with them, no matter the lives they have lived.

But, on seeing the life of the other, both feel like they made the right choice, in noting the flaws of the other and having seen the alternative, feeling that they have advantages to them. In particular, the supervillain self notes that while both of them have a fear of their deepest inner evils, the supervillain self notes the difference between them. The superhero self constantly lives in fear of it to this day; the supervillain self has conquered those fears, by feeling that their life is superior to that of what the inner evil could achieve. The inner evil could be so much more destructive, but would live a far more inferior, briefer, bloodier life that'd quickly be annihilated, so while the superhero feels afraid of the inner evil, the supervillain with their "above good and evil" mentality, literally feels above the inner evil, feeling like they have the superior life.

That being said, the superhero also feels some liberation in knowing they have the luxury of more options, more choices, existing. The prison is mostly of their own making, rather than the making of society. There's an active choice involved in choosing to continue to be good, instead of no choice involved in being forced to commit to a lifestyle.

And the entire book would explore the differences between these two mentalities.

That having been said.

I don't actually know how to turn it into a book.
I don't know how the story ends.
I don't know the nature of the super's powers (which would be the same in both).
I don't know the nature of the challenges they'd face, the nature of the world they live in.
I don't know the backstory, the worldbuilding, behind the book, nor a truly coherent plot. I have vague ideas of some things happening to the supervillain, but no truly coherent start to finish plot.

​So in spite of how much I love the book, I doubt I can make it.

But at least I haven't dropped another day, been doing work every day.
The two main things I've been working on; trying to get details done on Phyrra, and also trying multiple times to get the aesthetic of Kaze down--I thought that Kaze would be literally the easiest character in the cast to draw. He's a shade. Living shadow that lashes out strikes of air, slicing, dicing, piercing, thrashing, ripping, pulling, twisting, throwing, just, air itself in the form of a shadow.

The aesthetic I drew from could be summed up as from two sources; Kazeshini from the filler arc of Bleach, combined with a Darkness Elemental from Dragonfable.
A male, but incredibly effeminate form--very thin, pretty short, but still recognizably masculine, and yet a being who is mostly formless. White eyes and an occasional slasher smile, but no nose, no ears, no form beyond shadows that flicker like black flames. Recognizable arms and legs, with a recognizable chest, but for this to be bathed in shadows that make it not look like human skin. Anthropomorphic enough to still appear to be arms, legs, a torso, a head, but with enough obscurity to not give clearly defined edges. Where you can't tell where 'skin' begins because there is none to speak of. Where the shadows bleeding off of Kaze don't give a center of mass, because there is no center of mass.

I've tried multiple times to nail the aesthetic, but every time came up with frustrating failures. So I ended up biting the bullet and actually googled for the reference images from the two main sources of inspiration for Kaze.

And there you have it. (Yes, I did have to refer to an image of kazeshini not from the show itself, because none of the images from the show gave me the references I was looking for.)

The Darkness Elemental on the left, from Dragonfable, was one of the main aesthetics I was going for with the look. See the face, the shoulders, the chest? and the look on the arms (albeit, the arms on the darkness elemental are much much too big when it gets to the firsts)? That somewhat-transparent, wreathed in black darkness that oozes the aura of a blaze?

Now just give it the more anthropomorphic shape of kazeshini on the right, and you've got Kaze. This image shows perfectly the proportions of what I want Kaze to be--the thin, but still masculine, chest, with the approximately right proportioned arms and head, with the slasher smile and the killer eyes. (Bonus; this image has hair which looks a bit like the black flame-like aesthetic I am aiming for, at the forehead.)

It should be so easy to draw. Pencils provide the perfect medium to do it--you can nail the aesthetic of a living shadow, of flame-like wind sheathed in darkness, just by using pencil mark after pencil mark after pencil mark.

But it's still so darn hard to nail.

Still, tho.

​I'm trying!