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Just testing this out a little, seeing how much crap I can fill this in with. Looks like a lot, scoob. Go me for being a master coder!
1/3/23
1/3/23
If there's one way you can bypass algorithms and encourage interactivity, it's with a newsletter. I know many people have spam issues so they don't check their mail a ton, but since I'm not shoving a product in someone's face every day, it shouldn't be too spammy and encourage people to check their emails for Toveraverse stuff.
I used mailjet! It has a free service for a long ass time, and since I'm a nobody, it's perfect for starting out without paying a whipping $30 for a newsletter service.
I could've coded my own with enough googling around, but honestly, if someone has it done for you, just take the service. With enough googling, I was able to find a service doesn't gouge your wallet after 15-20 days. No headache required.
I'm hoping this idea helps me fix my social media reliance, and helps the site stand alone. Like, it won't fade into nothingness without the socials, and people have an incentive to go to it directly, skipping over my socials and just reading it through email announcements. This also helps me with not screeching over people liking my art and not checking out the novel (THEY'RE CONNECTED DAMMIT I DRAW SO THAT YOU CAN READ *SCREAMS*) because like. This way you see both. There is no picking and choosing which side of my creating you see if I use the newsletter. And that owns.
I MAY also use the newsletter to announce art I posted/streams, but. I don't wanna spam folks, like I said, so I'll lay off of that. I think I'll just use the site for that...I have to see if you can embed like, a streaming thing almost like Twitch? But for YT. I think YT is better for artists, since your VODs are up forever. Uhh, I'll test that out today and see if YT has that.
1/10/23
Insecurity is eating at meeeeee. I know i just started, techincally, since 3 months is really not a long time for getting anything going, but OOF. I think I'll keep my deeper thoughts to myself-I don't want to hurt the feelings of the people that have given me support already. I just need to stop comparing myself to others and understand that I'm right where I need to be! And that I can kill this isolation pretty fast if I just...keep at it. I want to make a Discord full of creators where we all chill and hang but...last time I did that, it ended super messy for me :/ I have the courage to try again, but I'm still really scared. Indie creators can be a little prickly-we have lots of pride for our hard work, and hey, that's 100% okay. But, I think sometimes our marginalization (as most of us are doing this because we don't see our stories getting published thanks to subject matter) has impacted our ways of relating, which leads to messy interpersonal relationships. This isn't to armchair diagnose all of us with CPTSD lol. I hate the pathologizing of normal human behavior. I just think...oof. There's always a risk of like...alienation, bullying, pretension, basically domination/control in a group if you aren't careful with who you let into a space and your life. This being said, everyone on neo has been a sweetheart, even the one person I ended up in a spat with, so I have faith in starting a Discord via Neocities before branching out.
1/10/23
Not sure why but pixiv doesn't...make me insecure? You'd think with all the gorgeous work on there I'd be insecure as hell, but I'm not. Even with a low like/follower count I feel fine. Maybe it's because it fits my niche? Like, y'know, I draw Japanese aligned stuff, so I'm in my element. Or maybe I'm just like, numb to the art I see because it isn't what I want to make? Idk. I think I'll hang there more though, since I don't feel like shit when scrolling through.
1/10/23
I finally took a break from insta+tumblr+twitter and I feel GREAT. Like I can take on the goddamn world. I'm ready to take creating into my own hands.
I joined these socials after a really bad event last October. Creatorgeddon. I fucked up, they fucked up, tons of shit happened and I lost connections. In construtive anger, I looked at my art, made my profiles, and started posting. Well uh, Twitter is like, ungrowable, insta stagnates at 40 followers, and Tumblr is very quiet. I'm keeping YT up because it has tons of potential, but for everything else? NOPE. Too much of my time goes into making myself advertisable. Fuck that. We're gonna hone in on my sites and get this party started.
Newsletters, this blog, the TC site, this site, all of it. I'm gonna go in deep and own my art, instead of making free content on a site that buries my voice. I think...tommorrow, I'll make a tutorial and post it. People praise my texture, so I wanna lean into it a bit. SO yeah. Fuck socials, full autism ahead, baby. We're gonna get consumed in the art sauce.
1/11/23
I befriended a stray cat, who has had kittens in our house, twice now. My current cat is actually from her, and this kitten is too. Unfortunately, I couldn't monitor them 24/7 and all died but this one (our dog us shittily trained and hostile to all living beings outside of us :/ he got to them while the mom would move them at night or when she left them alone-she'd make an opening big enough for the dog to get into :(((() but hey. He's here, and he's lived bitch. We call him Jacob and Joseph, but he's forever 'I lived bitch' in my head. He lived, bitch. And he's getting a home soon. I'll miss him very much-he's napped with me, sat with me, he sits on my shoulder while I work (he's doing it in these pics)...and has scratched my hands to oblivion. But I'll miss him all the same.
1/11/23
I found a YT vid where he claims that you can learn music theory in half an hour. And he wasn't lying. That video really can be teaching you music theory in half an hour. I have a bit of a music background, I did band in middle and high school. But y'know, school only takes you so far, and if you really wanna get into the thick of art, language learning, music, etc etc then you have to spend a lot of time outside of class.
As a kid and teen, I struggled in school/life balance due to many things, so yeah, no. I'm not doing a ton of extra work to understand music when my job is to read sheet music and play my flute. But I can't deny that even with my scant knowledge, knowing how to read sheet music and just playing has helped me subtly pick up the small, "extra" things, like knowing your treble, rhythm, major/minor chords click super easily, etc etc. So like, it's not right to say school is totally useless.
I want to buy a piano. I still have my flute from middle and high school, but its banged up from marching band and concert band back to back for years. Piano makes practicing/sketching music TONS faster. More effective. Since you can play and test ideas on the fly, where with flute, it's really one part of a whole band or song. Good for performing folk songs, or when you have a speaker playing a baseline or countermelody, but bad for trying to get the hang of music theory.
I'll link the vid below. It's really fucking good. Have fun.
1/15/23
I want to sketch out character themes and the like before I forget what I want it to sound like. So I made a jig.
We aren't IN Tovera proper yet, but it's like a mix of East Asia (Japan/China/Mongolia), Spain and South America (Columbia, Brazil, and Mexico especially), Britain/Ireland/Wales/Scotland, and a dash the Nordic countries. Which style goes where depends on which area of Tovera you're in, but I like to think I mixed them so well it makes the culture familiar, yet unique. Like, "Oh, I know that iconography, the tunic style, those frills, but it's so JRPG camp that it looks different" type of vibe. This also applies to the music, which I planned to commission, but now I want to do it myself, to own my voice in all things Tovera.
I wanted to drop a little sketch of the chorus I'm planning. The first two measures are the main melody, the last measure is uh...a countermelody, I think. This countermelody (this is probably wrong lol) plays as the main melody is going near the latter part of the chorus, which I haven't thought of yet-but I do want it to be my main leitmotif for the work. This will play (or uh, the novel will ASK you to, it doesn't have to) during a big scene in arc one. I think I captured the Japaneseish kinda sound, but the Latin esque beat will only show through once I include the other stuff.
1/15/23
FE, a franchise I adore and hate, is getting a new entry after years of discourse around if starting war, working with genocidal maniacs, killing off a genocide survivor and ignoring the blatant antisemitism of it all is based or not because it's done by an anime girl. Glad that shit's over! Here's a pic of one of the objetively good designs in the game, celebrating 2 days until release!
Of course, Mika already posted a Veyle for the countdown today, so it got no likes on Twitter or Insta. Yay, I guess. More than that, I'm sad that I'm gonna miss out on the OC art swap-my health has been fucky so I didn't sign up, I don't want to let someone down and tbh my refs for characters suck anyway. If there's one each month, then I'll do it next time :(((( sad to see a communal project slip through my fingers though.
1/18/23
My stylus for my tablet is gone, so I resorted to watercolors before I lost my goddamn mind. I wanted to hash out Luana's transformation visually, because right now we're in the prologue and I don't have the chance to show off her weirdness yet.
Spoilers incoming but: it's revealed pretty early that she's a changeling, and has lived in the fae plane for a spell. There's no way in the millions of hells in the world of Tovera that she hasn't been warped beyond looking like a black Tolkien elf now. This being said, if I revealed how all of her quirks look and work early on, that would be no fun-so for now, her blue hair and blue tipped limbs is all you get to see in story...and below (no limbs pictured, to lazy lol).
I would make this a HWTF, but I wanna keep those somewhat clean. And I'd like to reward people for indulging in my thoughts here in some way, so yeah, blog dwellers get to see messy sketches and the like. Once I make a companion worldbuilding PDF, these drawings will all go into it maybe, but for now, I'd like to just store them here and show them off to whoever visits.
1/20/23
Uh oh...someone's having an identity crisis, and that someone is me.
Every weeb wants to make a manga, but many underestimate how much work goes into it. I know I sure did. As a teen, I bought CSP, and tried to sketch it out, only to immediately short circut and put it away for a while.
I have health problems. I have brain problems. I have brain problems that cause health problems. I have little time as a college student. Blah blah blah. I give myself compassion, because these things do hinder even novel making-it's why I chose a serial format in general. It allows me to be my own boss and make my own rules without being wrung dry by a corporation. I like taking my time to write and hask things out, I like going slow, I like making art I'm proud of, and going indie allows me to do that.
HOWEVER. Someone I was once friends with made a good point-most people make novels when they legit have no choice but to. Not from the love of prose, but from a desparate attempt to hash out their story in ANY form, or it won't get done or be seen. And...yeah. That's exactly what Tovera in it's current form is right now. I wanted to make a comic, but back when my drive to do so was at it's peak, I realized how lacking I was and went to making a light novel. I mean, I like prose. But my visual communication is MUCH stronger.
Anyways, now, I feel a newfound vigor to try comic making. Where it came from is a little shallow, I suppose-light novels have little support, little widespread appeal, no publsihers willing to advertise it as OEL Japanese-inspired work (OEL manga has publishers willing to take it in-some publishers SPECIALIZE in OEL manga!) and my art is my biggest asset-I appeal to a Japanese niche, so a comic in that style will get me into Japanese creative circles no sweat, and all they'd have to do is wait for a translation, as opposed to my novel, which has an art style Westerners don't like but is written in English. I guess this is all to say, my poor little novel is hindering my creative potential, all because it's prose instead of a comic. It pains me to admit it, but it's true. So now I want to see if I can do justice to the original intended form of the work this way, through indie comics/OEL manga.
I admit, part of me had a fantasy of being a *super cool(tm)* animanga inspired artist that broke into the light novel scene and established OEL LNs as equal in importance and fun/entertainment value as OEL manga and manga in general...but light novels are never really big in western animanga circles until they get an anime or manga adaptation-if I knew Japanese prose, I'd still make my little darling a LN, since it has more of a potential audience in Japan (JP light novels are slowburn, slice of life, worldbuilding friendly)-but I am no expert in JP prose, and I think webnovels and reading in general is not like...IN anymore. People write, but don't read, I think.
Well, whatever. That's my little mini crisis right now, as someone stuck between worlds and finding (or has already found, but can't capitalize on/generate interest in) their niche. If Tovera becomes a manga, the main site's front page will be powered by rarebit, and will become more webcomic styled-though I will keep the navibar and other pages the same, they're way too cute to be changed.
2/14/23
