extremely NSFW art ahead

Continue reading →

Yesterday there was a post on one of the sci-fi subreddits from someone going “every time I try to write Space Wizards they just turn into Jedi, how can I make them not just Jedi, halp”. And there were a lot of responses when I got there but I sat there over dinner tapping out a long list of things Jedi don’t do along with suggestions on how that could be interesting.

And these two bits I wrote just keep on sticking with me:

Jedi aren’t psychopomps. They don’t sit down their bodies and go wandering the low astral plane, looking for lost souls who need a guide with some knowledge of the after life. Make your space wizards have a ton of favors they end up being able to call in as a side effect of this.

Jedi don’t do exorcisms. Make your space wizards clear out psychic debris from people, places, and things. “Clearing out a spaceship full of ancient alien ghosts” sounds like a great way to spend a chapter. Hell, that’s a great way to dump a bunch of plot tokens, too – one ancient alien ghost gave them a message to pass on to something halfway across the galaxy, whoever hired the wizard to do this now owes them, etc.

I wanna read this book now. If I wasn’t just getting a project going with Nick I’d be tempted to try and write it. It probably needs a few more ideas beyond “a space psychopomp would be a super neat protagonist for a space opera” but I just like the feel of it. Maybe I should just try doodling a short story of “space wizard is hired to exorcise a haunted spaceship and ends up playing psychopomp for a few of its denizens” and see how it feels.

this is not a yes-or-no question:

tools matter, the right tool in skilled hands can do amazing, unique things that can’t be done by another tool

tools don’t matter, if you don’t have the faintest clue what you’re doing then you’re not going to get great results

tools matter, if a beginner’s using really shitty tools it’ll make the whole experience even more frustrating

tools don’t matter, if an expert’s using those same shitty tools they can still make magic

tools matter, along the way to expertise you will find needs for a lot of very specific tools, which can do very specific things much faster than more general tools, sometimes you have to make these specific tools yourself

tools don’t matter, you can easily spend apocalyptic amounts of money on filling an entire workshop with tools only to find that you don’t need those very specialized tools anywhere near often enough to justify their cost when you use them

what do you need for the job at hand? what do you need for the jobs you want to be doing in the future? what do you find a voice in the back of your head whispering you need without any idea what you’ll do with it? what do you want simply because it’s something you use every damn day and you want a nice tool that feels good in your hand?

All of the above is a comment I decided not to make over at Hacker News regarding a post by the same title from someone chronicling his journey as a photographer. Which ultimately came to the same conclusion of “it matters, and it doesn’t matter”.

I’m having that little voice whisper that I need to be spending a thousand bucks a year on the priciest version of Toon Boom. I’ve been fooling with the demo and I keep on being impressed by all these little features that have a lot of thought and observation of the complex process of having a group of people come together to make drawings move, it’s got so many things I couldn’t even begin to wish for when I was using Flash around the turn of the century, it’s all so beautifully integrated in a way no workflow I cobbled together with Adobe’s suite could ever be. But I also think about how much of the process of Making A Cartoon feels like boring work I don’t want to do. Is this a case where if I start doing stuff, people will show up to help? Maybe. I dunno. I gotta spend some more time exploring the demo before the trial runs out and I have to either cough up a month’s rent on my home for a year of running Toon Boom, see if I can get a key from my acquaintances in the industry, or put on my pirate hat. There’s just a bunch of ways I feel like I’ve reached Illustrator’s limits lately and I’m looking for some very specific kinds of functionality that I think I might find in there. And annoyingly one of these very specific functions is one of the things that Toon Boom sharply limits in the cheaper version.

So fucking weird to feel myself pulled towards animation again.