So my depression seems to have escaped. Thank the Lords. I'm feeling motivated again, which is a good thing. It took about 3 and 1/2 months this time. A new record!

I screwed up with my last few newsletters because I tried to link the video version of this blog, buuuut… they didn’t work! ☹ So now I have to make sure the video is posted first.

But yes! These newsletters are also vTuber vlogs now. If you want to hear my voice and see my little bouncing avatar, head on over to my YouTube vlog channel and subscribe!

A special little treat for my newsletter folks… You all get a sneak peek of a print I made! And also first dibs on the tiny quantity I have available in my shop 🙂

I have a process video going up soon. This print was hand-carved on a lino block and hand-printed using an etching press (a big rolling squish-majig).

But until then, voila!

Taurus season is over for most folks, but not for me, as a year-round Taurus. I’d like to do more astrology prints in this style, so stay tuned if you like the star signs.

So, my plan to have finished stories to publish this year got, uh thoroughly destroyed, as things do.

I've been easing back into writing by collecting my imaginary world lore. I'm using WikiDpad, which is a little open-source software that makes like a desktop wiki thingama bobber. It makes finding stuff a lot faster than using a regular document.

And woof, there's a lotta stuff. I had this old document that I wrote in 2015. And when I reread it, I realized that a lot of what I'm doing today kind of was inspired from it. A lot more than I thought! Cuz when I was writing that lore doc in 2015, I realized something.

I… wasn't smart enough to write these stories.

Well, not the right kind of smart, anyway.

The story I wanted to write was big. I’d just graduated college. I barely knew who I was, let alone how governments fail.

And I know now… boy, do I know now…

So, yeah, like I said, this revelation in 2015 kind of set me on my path to today. It gave me… quests!

Quest one probably took the longest. I spent the last 11 years reading bunches of non-fiction. Ron Chewnow’s history of the Morgan family, Noah Yuval Harrari's Sapiens, a bunch of Malcolm Gladwell stuff.

I also listened to economics podcasts and design podcasts like Planet Money and 99% Invisible.

Not to mention, I worked in corporate America and tried to navigate life around that for 11 years. And still do!

Quest two slid inside of quest one. I listed out and read a bunch of authors who managed to achieve the kind of things I wanted to do. Ursula K. Le Guin, Mercedes Lackey, Brandon Sanderson, Martha Wells.

I read outside my fantasy niche. Dan Brown and Michael Creighton, Cinder and Warrior Cats. I read everything; and I learned a lot.

Quest three really kicked in a couple years ago. My corpo job helped me too by like… forcing me into unpaid management roles. I took all that corpo learning and slapped it into plans for turning my stories into animation.

I wanted my stuff to be interconnected. So, no matter what I worked on, I'd be moving forward. And well, Quest three is where my video blog and vTubing came from. Good ole’ creative journaling!

All those quests thanks to this ancient lore document I dug out of my hard drive!

So, while I didn't publish any books, or make any viral posts, or sell a lot of art, I think my quests really did a lot for me. And all the education kind of made me into something different.

A bitter, jaded luddite!

Now, I'm printing that old lore book into a hand bound thing that I can bring with me everywhere. I made the margins huge so I could write in them.

Did you know old books used to have gigantic margins for that? Knowledge!

Printing and binding is complicated, but the internet is here to help. And for once, the thing I'm trying to learn is ancient. There's so much information about it. It's refreshing to do something that, like, actually exists.

Speaking of being a luddite…

I took a letterpress workshop this past weekend and not only was it great, it also made me strangely melancholy.

We used a small tabletop press. The teacher is a letter press nerd named Kurt, who bought his first letterpress machine out the back of a Popular Science magazine with his first paycheck at 15. He brought in some of the lead type he'd collected over the years so that we could use it to make a small print.

To produce letterpress stuff, you need, like, an entire warehouse, cuz to have multiple different fonts and five different point sizes, you'd need, like, two entire 3-ft long cabinets.

And that's just for two different fonts! What if you had like 20 different fonts?

The entire letterpress industry is mostly antique now, replaced by digital printing. Now people aren't even using those and just reading stuff digitally. I mean, to print entire books on the little letterpress machine we had would take an extremely long time. It also feels poignant to me today because of all the clankers. AI, and such.

I mean, turning books digital eliminated entire job industries. So, what will turning art and writing digital do to job industries?

Back when I was learning about concept art, I learned about photo-bashing and putting 3D models into illustrations to be able to pump out lots of ideas in a day. So, when a client says, "I want to see the other side of the elephant,” all you had to do is turn the 3D model around instead of redrawing the whole thing.

They've even separated light from drawings. You learn values—black and white, and then you learn color—how to add it back into a drawing. Then, you learn how to light the drawing. All so that some creative director could go, "Actually, I want the light to be orange." And you can change it to suit them without costing them a bunch of money.

What about planning before production? Maybe planning is actually what's dead. Hmm.

So, everything I learned about photo-bashing, separating colors, all to please a creative director… just feels kind of useless now.

Directors can just ask AI to redo the whole thing now. No whiny human who needs to eat required.

But before I learned to paint digitally, I learned to paint in high school art classes. I learned how to layer watercolor. I learned in college how to do acrylic painting, how to draw still lives using charcoal, how to paint with oils.

Those skills transferred when I learned digital art. But the real world doesn't have an undo button. It doesn't have multiply layers or color adjustments. And with the art directors all obsessed with their non-organic clanker slaves, there's no one left to please with those skills.

So maybe I get to enjoy the efficiency for myself.

There are some artists who go all the way back to handmade basics, grinding and mixing their own oil pigments for paintings. In the 1500s, painters were tradespeople like cloth makers. They had apprentices who ground their pigments, helped paint backgrounds. Like letterpress, there used to be an entire industry that helped successful artists do their work.

I don't have a garage to store 10 letterpress fonts in five different sizes. I don't have a team of ink and paint specialists who can line all 400 of the animation frames I draw. It's just me and the computer.

My stinky organic oily human body, and this got-dang clanker!

And that's all I have to say about that for today.

My research study has fallen into dark territory. Statistical territory! AHHHH.

The last few weeks have been about the statistical analysis of my fake data. We're learning descriptive statistics, which is just like… describing the data. Then we do hypothesis testing to see if there was a change from condition A to condition B. Last is correlation testing where we measure the strength and direction of the changes on a specific pair of variables.

So, I don't really understand it, but I think I'll get there eventually.

I think the statistics will be the most challenging part of my study, which is unsurprising considering my math awfulness. I was even thinking of getting someone else's help with the analysis, someone at my school who actually does statistics to help make sure I get them right.

A weird part of me finds boiling down my study to a bunch of numbers is kind of strange. This whole idea that the entire world can be examined by numbers. I've always had trouble with numbers, so it freaks me out a bit to have to work with them like that. It also feels almost too easy.

Like the numbers give you pretty much a yes or no. My study is a psychological one essentially, and it just feels… I don't know, like there should be more complexity. Not to say it isn't already complex.

Ugh, I don't know what I'm trying to say, but I do know that I'll be submitting my study to the IRB this summer and see what happens. I'll keep you updated!

And that's all I have for you today, folks. Have a good one and stay safe out there!