Art And Job Stuff, or: Why Cracker Sucks And What He's Planning To Do About It

Okay, so the Thorax fic is up, and finished. Reception has been quiet, but not bad, so I'm fairly happy about it. For someone who tends to stick to pre-Starlight Glimmer stories, it's not the worst.

Now, starting with the art update. I have gone and made my first anthro model, an orca girl, up to the texturing phase. UV unwrapping turned out to be something I still haven't quite mastered, even if I know the basics of it, so I couldn't do the white pattern exactly the way I liked. I started several other models in the meantime, they are all nowhere near done, not even in the modelling stage. Facial rigging turned out to be its usual drag, and the Universe has told me to just forget all that silliness and stick to blend shapes, which actually works right out of the box.

Basically, I'm thinking I need to work on my fundamentals again, and I'll be doing so by means of actual tutorials this time. I started with the Captain Blender model from Tony Mullen's book today, had to stop after about an hour of work because turns out box modelling and facial topology don't mix too well when you don't know what you're doing. I have no idea how fast it'll go, but I need the practice anyway, so I intend to persist until I get through the book, and after that I'll be repeating the process, following video tutorials, and after that I'll finish up the other practice models I started (one of which includes Zabivaka, so that's something my Russian fans can look forward to ). Professional artsing remains a difficult prospect, but the plans are still there. I know where I can sign up for payrolling, the major problems would be pricing and of course the output itself. I'm taking notes, deciding on where to go next.

And one of the major issues remains motivation. Yeah, went to another job interview on Monday, another job I predicted months beforehand they'd refuse me for because they have my personality data already. I'm an analytical kind of person, I don't belong in an operational position. Still applied, went through the motions, passed all the tests, got to the interview and, I kid you not, they actually said that "If we gave you this job, we don't think you'd be happy."

As if I'm happy being unemployed. Anyway, the argument boiled down to me being a thinker and them needing doers. It kinda sucks to get stuck with a label, but it gets even worse when you know the label is accurate yet everyone around you can't seem to read said label and still insists on going against it. Yeah, I'm a thinker, not a problem solver. By the way, same night I got this result my mom's laptop finally got completely borked and refused to start up. Solved that problem by just booting it from a USB and installing Lubuntu instead of regular. Works fine now. Totally not a problem solver, nope

So yeah... trying to keep the whining to a minimum here, but in case the next story ends up a little depressing, now you know where it's coming from. I am trying to get out of this post-failure funk as fast as possible, probably get some actual work done tomorrow.

As for the next story, Orphanhooves hasn't progressed much since last update, but I made a few tweaks to the opening, will be writing an expansion to the prologue tonight. I'll be aiming to flesh out one scene per night, outlining scenes when I need to advance beyond what I have, so probably... mid-November, at the latest, it should be done and ready for publishing, if all goes well. Oh, and I'm reading Treasure Island now, too. New Year's resolutions and all I like it so far, and I wish I could put my finger on why. Like King Solomon's Mines, I want my stuff to be that good, but it's in first-person and I can't steal anything for third-person narratives I'm also rethinking some major parts of the novel, particularly if it even needs a villain, after some discussion in the group forums here.

Anyway, with regards to Orphanhooves, here's a bit of music you may recall from an earlier post, but still holds up. Also, I'm totally making Vinyl play this for the elephants: